Synagogue records in Ireland comprise the records kept by synagogues of the Jewish community in Ireland over the last several hundred years. The Jewish community in Ireland has always been small by comparison with those of other countries in Europe like England, Spain, France, Germany or Poland, never exceeding 6,000 people and generally lying somewhere between 2,000 and 5,000 people. Nevertheless, this community has generated a substantial body of records going back as far as 1664. These include a wide range of records containing valuable genealogical material like records of births, marriages and burials. Given that civil registrations and official government records of this kind did not begin in Ireland until the mid-nineteenth century and a huge proportion of Ireland’s civil records were then destroyed in the fire of the Public Records Office in Dublin in 1922, these synagogue records are an especially valuable resource for anyone wishing to trace their Jewish ancestors in Ireland.[1]
Research your ancestors on MyHeritage
History of the Jewish people in Ireland
Geographically Ireland lies on the western extremity of Europe, far from the Levant and the Mediterranean. It was also not conquered by the Romans and while there was clearly quite a bit of trade between the Roman Empire and the island of Hibernia, as they termed it, between the first and fifth centuries CE, Ireland was effectively at the fringes of the known world in ancient times. Therefore, when the Jewish diaspora began to grow in late antiquity owing to the anti-Jewish policies of successive Roman imperial governments, Ireland would not have experienced any major Jewish settlement, unlike, for instance, Egypt, Turkey, Spain and other parts of the Mediterranean world. This tendency continued for many centuries to come. The arrival of five Jews to Ireland from abroad in 1062 was considered an unusual enough occurrence to merit a record of it being made in the Annals of Inisfallen, one of the great series of Irish annalistic histories, under that year.[2]
It was probably during the High Middle Ages, when the governments of countries like England and France began mass expulsions of their Jewish communities that the first small waves of Jewish people arrived to Ireland. A few records of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries indicate that there were some Jews living in Dublin and the other port towns at this time. In 1555, William Moses Annyas, whose grandfather was a Portuguese Marrano Jew who migrated to Ireland at the end of the fifteenth century, became mayor of the southern port town of Youghal. His family remained prominent urban figures in the town for decades to come.[3]
From the seventeenth century and in particular the tolerance afforded to the Jewish people by Oliver Cromwell’s Protectorate government in the 1650s, the history of the Jewish community in Ireland becomes clearer. The first synagogue that we have records for was founded in Dublin in 1662. By the middle of the eighteenth century there were distinct communities of Jews in Dublin, Meath and Cork. However, the Jewish population remained quite small, never exceeding more than a couple of hundred in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This began to change in the nineteenth century, in large part owing to the anti-Semitic policies of the Russian Empire in particular, and also because Irish Catholic emancipation leaders like Daniel O’Connell consciously formed political alliances with Jewish leaders in London.[1]
The intensification of the Jewish pogroms in imperial Russia led to the Jewish community in Ireland reaching a peak of over 5,000 people in the 1890s and 1900s, with synagogues in Dublin, Cork, Waterford, Limerick, Belfast and several provincial towns. Chaim Herzog, the sixth President of Israel, in office between 1983 and 1993, was born in Belfast in the north of Ireland in 1918, the son of an Ashkenazi Jew from Poland, Rabbi Yitzhak HaLevi Herzog. The family left for what was then the British Mandate of Palestine in 1935.[4] The Jewish community in Ireland declined considerably in the second half of the twentieth century as many Irish Jews left Ireland for Israel, with many synagogues closing as a result. However, the number has increased in the early twenty-first century to nearly 2,500 owing to an influx of American Jews working for the large number of US technology companies which have headquarters in Ireland.[5]
Where to find synagogue records in Ireland
There are synagogue records available for Ireland dating back to 1664, with the oldest records containing mostly Sephardic Jewish surnames. These are particularly detailed for the period from 1850 onwards when the Jewish community began to grow considerably in Dublin and elsewhere on the island. In 2022, 22 volumes of these records compiled by Stuart Rosenblatt, president of the Irish Jewish Genealogical Society, covering over 300 years of the history of the Irish Jewish community, were donated to the National Library of Israel and can be consulted there and online.[6] Records of over 60,000 Jewish births in Ireland from 1850 onwards are available through the Jewish Birth Index from MyHeritage.
What can be found in synagogue records in Ireland
As with any kind of religious records, synagogue records for Ireland tend to provide information largely about births, marriages and deaths or burials. These records are of great utility to anyone studying their Jewish ancestors in Ireland as they provide some of the key items of information for any basic genealogical study. Some of these records can complement other records relating to Jewish people who migrated from Ireland to Israel in the twentieth century. The 22 volumes of records at the National Library of Israel also include ancillary material relating to the Irish Jewish community beyond synagogue records, such as police and immigration records of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries which relate to the large influx of Jewish migrants to Ireland at that time.[6]
Explore more about synagogue records in Ireland
- Ireland, Jewish Birth Index from JewishGen records collection on MyHeritage
- 1901 Ireland Census records collection on MyHeritage
- Jewish Genealogy with JewishGen.org at Legacy Family Tree Webinars
- Jewish Genealogy's Other Side: Sephardic Research at Legacy Family Tree Webinars
- U.S. Synagogue Records as a Genealogical Resource at Legacy Family Tree Webinars
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 Timeline. Jewish Museum of Ireland
- ↑ Annals of Inisfallen. Corpus of Electronic Texts
- ↑ Añes, William. Dictionary of Irish Biography
- ↑ The Belfast man who became president of Israel. Irish Times
- ↑ Jewish Population in Ireland Rises by 30%, Much to Surprise of Local Community. Haaretz
- ↑ 6.0 6.1 National Library accepts set of Irish-Jewish genealogical archives dating to 1700s. Times of Israel