Oliver Sears is the founder of Holocaust Awareness Ireland. ‘Irish politicians line up to be photographed with the community on Holocaust Memorial Day,’ he writes, ‘But those same politicians will not stand up publicly now to denounce the explosion of antisemitic rhetoric that has spilled into the public arena, including both houses of parliament.’
I have a photograph, circa 1908 of my great-grandmother, Perla Rozenblum aged eighteen with a group of friends in Vienna at the tombstone of Theodor Herzl, the godfather of modern Zionism who died in 1904. How this group of Jewish friends from Poland found themselves there, I cannot be sure. Forty years before the founding of the State of Israel, Zionism was certainly less definable than today. Zionism, by its simplest definition, is the right of self-determination for Jews in their ancestral homeland and the locus of their religion. Although it remains, in the words of the writer Howard Jacobson, a hundred different dreams.
Perla and her husband, Dawid Lasocky died before the horror of the Holocaust, in Łódź, Poland’s second city. Their son-in-law, Pawel Rozenfeld, my grandfather, was not a committed Zionist. A secular Jew, he was nonetheless a respected member of the Jewish community who saw the future of his family rooted in Poland, despite growing anti-Jewish hostility which included racist laws which were enacted from 1935. After the death of Marshal Piłsudski in 1935, there were shameful quotas for Jewish students by university institutions. In 1938, a citizenship law stripped Polish Jews who had lived outside the country for five years of their citizenship, to deter those Jews of Polish extraction living in Germany from returning. Having been expelled by the Nazis, these Jews found themselves in a legal no man’s land, shorn of the rights of citizenship and residency.
Many Jews decided to leave Poland during this period creating a pre-war diaspora of Polish Jewry in England, France, America and Palestine and other counties. Those fleeing to Palestine were not universally Zionist idealogues; many were seeking refuge among their own in the hope that they had found the one place where, far from being persecuted for their identity, their identity might save them. For Pawel, alas, his optimism betrayed him. Nazi occupation saw him arrested at his factory in Łódź in November 1939, taken to Radogoszcz detention centre, fifteen minutes’ drive away, tortured for eleven days before being led into nearby Lagiewniki woods and executed, for being a Jew.
Since 7 October of last year, a new wave of anti-Semitism has swept over much of the world. My family legacy ensures that I am no stranger to the forces that promote anti-Semitism, nor how quickly it so easily attaches itself to negative events and societal malaise. The current conflict in the Middle East has created anti-Zionist sentiment globally on an unprecedented level which has inevitably spilled over into the vilification of Jews.
In Ireland, my home for almost forty years, (I was born in London where I lived until I was 18) vehement opposition to Israel and Zionism, in particular, has seen demonstrations with expressions that are antisemitic, including the flying of Hamas and PFLP flags and chants that hurl invective at all Jews, not just Israelis. On the campus of University College Dublin, a sign rippling with historical irony read, ‘Zionist-Free Zone’. The term Judenfrei, which it echoes, refers to zones which Reinhard Heydrich, one of the architects of the Final Solution, sought to establish in Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe, by deporting Jews from those areas and murdering them.
The students’ union of Trinity College Dublin also declared that Zionists were not welcome on campus. At the height of the stand-off, Jewish students were offered a safe room if they felt they were in danger. I wondered if it was the attic. The students’ union blockaded the entrance to the Book of Kells, situated in the famous Trinity Long Room. As an important tourist attraction, also representing a valuable source of income, Trinity decided to fine the students’ union, knowing full well that the sums involved could not be met by the union who had no intention of ending their protest. It was Trinity who buckled with little resistance, agreeing to review all their financial connections with Israel, promising to withdraw from all funds that could be associated with the IDF or the occupation or with Israel, in general. The students union also received support from a number of Trinity academics.
A Jewish writer friend of mine told me that she was asked by the organisers of a festival if she was a Zionist. Answering affirmatively saw her invitation cancelled; a story that has been repeated throughout every sector. For diaspora Jews who have been cancelled, insulted and attacked, contemporary Zionism may once again be defined as a refuge, the one place where they can live safely at least theoretically, however improbable that may seem with Israel under bombardment both physically and metaphorically.
Last November, in a Guardian article, written by Rory Carroll and Lisa O’Carroll, the following remarks were ascribed to Niall Holohan, a former high ranking Irish diplomat with long experience in the Middle East as he explained Ireland’s especially vocal pro-Palestinian stance:
Holohan claims that another factor in Ireland’s outlook has been its tiny community of approximately 2,500 Jews – barely 0.05 per cent – that contrasts with sizeable and influential Jewish communities in Britain and France. ‘It’s given us a freer hand to take what we consider a more principled position,’ he said.
So easily the mask slips, endorsing the worst kind of antisemitic conspiracy theory; that Jews act as a cabal influencing governments and economies and (therefore) Ireland with its minuscule Jewish population is ‘freer’ to govern itself independently. Here is a reflexive antisemitism which blindly sees all Jews as a monolith tied duplicitously to Israel, although in this case, we are deemed not large enough to threaten the state. His short statement drips with contempt, revealing how such antiquated anti-Jewish racism presents itself in contemporary political commentary, without the least self-doubt.
Ireland and the Jews
But unlike most European countries, Ireland’s relationship with its Jews does not represent the undulating line on a heart monitor with the occasional flatline that has been the tragedy of European Jewry for a millennium. The story is a little happier. Over the last 150 years, since the first wave from Lithuania, Ireland’s Jews have mostly kept a low-profile, with the exception of lord mayors in Cork and Dublin and a handful of TDs (members of parliament). The pogrom in Limerick in 1904, instigated by Redemptorist priest John Creagh, is an anomaly. Terrifying for the five families forced to flee, including Simon Sebag Montefiore’s great-grandfather, the violence was, nonetheless, minor compared to that in eastern Europe, where pogroms were defined by their murderous brutality. The Jewish population peaked before the war at around 5,000. The foundation of Israel saw many make Aliyah while others left for London and Manchester to find Jewish spouses and the opportunity to be part of a larger Jewish community. Today’s Jewish population in Ireland stands at 3,500, a thousand of whom work for international companies with offices in Ireland and most of these are Israeli.
While Ireland endured the rigid yoke of a harsh, cruel and unforgiving brand of Catholicism, its lack of empathy towards Jews a matter of record, it is important to note that de Valera, Ireland’s prime minister ensured that Jews were protected in the Irish constitution in 1937. This was in recognition of the treatment of Jews in Germany by the Nazis at that time where the Nuremburg laws were rapidly diminishing their rights. The number of Jewish Irish citizens was so small that this gesture would not prove burdensome to the state, even if the Nazis invaded. De Valera, like almost all European leaders at the Evian conference in July 1938 showed little interest in offering safe harbour to Germany’s Jews. Barely sixty were allowed to enter the state during the twelve years of the Third Reich and for years afterwards. The UK, by contrast accepted 80,000. De Valera’s infamous act of signing the book of condolence at the German Embassy at the death of Hitler is used, mistakenly, as evidence of the Irish Prime minister’s anti-Semitism. A woefully poor decision, it was nonetheless motivated by the overzealous need to demonstrate Ireland’s anti-British, pro-neutrality position.
With the Zionist cause gathering momentum in British Mandate Palestine in the thirties, the Irish State was broadly supportive of the Jewish desire for self-determination and an independent state. The similarities with the Irish struggle for independence against British rule made it easy for the Irish psyche and body politik to show solidarity and make common cause. Yitzhak Shamir who led the Lehi militant group, also known as the Stern gang and Menachem Begin, leader of the Irgun, another Zionist paramilitary organisation, received training and weaponry from the IRA. Shamir’s nom de guerre was Michael after the Irish revolutionary Michael Collins. Both became Israeli prime ministers.
Attitudes in Ireland began to change, however, after the Six-Day War. While the defence of the Israeli state against concerted attacks from multiple, neighbouring Arab states was understood and supported, the subsequent annexation of territory was not and was viewed broadly as colonisation. As the occupation of Palestinian territory endured and expanded, sentiment in Ireland hardened against Israel and for the Palestinians. The PLO and the Provisional IRA developed a close relationship with exchanges of arms, intelligence and training. Within twenty years of the founding of the state of Israel, the dynamic had flipped. Radical socialism, exemplified by the Kibbutzim had also attracted young Irish idealists among the multi-national cast of non-Jewish visitors eager to sample the camaraderie of a miniature egalitarian society. Israel was now considered less favourably among the revolutionary class.
Until the Hamas atrocities, life for me as a non-Irish Jewish person living in Ireland and openly expressing my Jewish identity is best described as free and unmolested in large part. Jews here are viewed as a little exotic, partly because we are so few in number; most Irish people have never met a Jew. Indeed, the most famous Jew in Irish history is the confection of Leopold Bloom, created by James Joyce, himself a non-Jew. Ireland’s neutrality during the war and the fact that its Jewish population did not experience the Holocaust directly, means that the Holocaust does not feature in the Irish psyche or cultural memory.
This deficit in sensibility explains the broad lack of sensitivity and awareness of historical and contemporary antisemitism, creating a mentality that quietly tolerates Jews in Ireland.
Who wants to be tolerated? Accepted, respected, embraced but, please, not tolerated. Or perhaps, even worse, the philosemite who condescends and, unwittingly, does the bidding of the antisemites by extolling the much-overstated cleverness and wealth of Jews.
The politicians line up to be photographed with the community on Holocaust Memorial Day. When my organisation, Holocaust Awareness Ireland was invited by the Irish State to mount the exhibition, The Objects of Love at Dublin Castle, (the seat of the Irish State),which tells the story of my family before, during and after the Holocaust, all the major politicians, the president and the supreme court lined up to see it (and to be seen). And in a country that turned its back on Europe’s Jews in the most desperate circumstances, 35,000 people queued to see it, the first exhibition of its kind to take place in Ireland, unaware that they were also paying their respects to my family. This reminded me of the Irish tradition of the ‘removal’ where the body of the deceased is laid out in an open coffin in the funeral home, the day before the funeral takes place, in order for friends and family to say goodbye and make their presence known; there were, of course, no such niceties for my murdered family. For them, there were no funerals and there are no marked graves. Those same politicians will not stand up publicly now to denounce the explosion of antisemitic rhetoric that has spilled into the public arena, including both houses of parliament. Alas, retail politics insists that there are no votes in it for them when the trend and mood is so overwhelmingly one-sided. It seems easier to acknowledge the suffering of dead Jews than living ones.
Christy Moore’s Palestine
The song, Palestine, which the folk singer Christy Moore, an icon of contemporary Irish music, has been singing for months deserves special mention as it is a perfect example of a crude, unconscious bias now metastasizing into full blown antisemitism. This song now chimes with a language that is now expressed across the debate. Written by Seattle based Jim Page, the song begins: ‘the Jews and the Arabs lived all the same for 1,000 years until the Zionists came…’ This is ahistorical, demonising Zionists who, the song goes on, ‘came in a river and a flood.’
The Zionists who came in ‘a river and a flood’ were Jews persecuted first in pre-war Europe and who then comprised the sorry remnants of the Holocaust, including some of my family. The Zionists who came from the Middle East were expelled from neighbouring Arab countries, mirroring the Palestinian Nakba, from 1946 until 1980, by which time 850,000 Mizrahi Jews had been displaced including the family of my aunt by marriage. These Jews did not have any concept of colonisation; they were all refugees. Nor is their trauma principally defined by the Holocaust, a tragedy for European Jewry but by their own exodus.
There’s more. ‘They talk about dollars’, the lyrics continue, which obviously refers to (Jewish) American support of Israel, a dog whistle to the cliched, seemingly evergreen anti-Semitic tropes of dual loyalty and the centuries old conspiracy theory concerning Jews and money. The word ‘jackboot’ referring to Israeli behaviour towards Palestinians is the single most jarring note of the song. This is unreconstructed Holocaust inversion. The false equivalencing of Nazi oppression of Jews to the oppressive behaviour of the Israeli State in the occupied territories towards Palestinians minimises the Holocaust and dispossess Jews of the worst suffering in their history, still in living memory, ratcheting up hatred towards all Jews, regardless of the political intention.
Christy Moore approached me two years ago when he was about to release 1942, a song about the arrival of a trainload of deported Jews to Auschwitz. He wanted reassurance that he had not unwittingly trampled on sensibilities. I was grateful that he had been so thoughtful and, even more so, when he offered me the song to use in my own advocacy, something I have not done.
I wrote to him expressing my horror at the lyrics of Palestine. I also explained my confusion that he wanted affirmation from me for the first song but not the second. His reply was courteous and gracious, stating that the song had been sent to him to perform at a gig in aid of Médecins Sans Frontières and that he had been accused of being both an anti-Semite and a Hamas supporter, an accusation I do not make. However, I am sure that Hamas are not unhappy with the song. Christy did not answer my questions. I told him that his song makes me want to leave Ireland. He wished me well. He continues to play Palestine.
Even the Irish President
In extremis, Zionism – like any other form of nationalism – has a racist and bigoted element. In Israel this represents about 7 per cent of the population. The continued expansion of settlements in the West Bank is illegal, unjustified and morally repellent. But the assault on Zionism has now blurred into full scale antisemitism. Why are Jews, alone, not entitled to express their identity through their ancient connection to their homeland? Howard Jacobson again: ‘The Jews are the most racially abused people in history. To deny them the right to be who they are is racism. Anti-Zionism is, itself racism.’
The equivocation of Zionism to Nazism is now so frequently invoked that even the euphony of these two words becomes a blended sound. The language I hear denouncing Zionism is identical to the language deployed by antisemites, historical and current. Last November saw violent anti-immigration riots in Dublin which were linked, by a cocktail of magical thinking and old-fashioned Jew hatred to the actions of Israel.
Richard Boyd Barrett, an elected member of the Oireachtas standing outside Government Buildings, warned about ‘a fight for humanity, for a civilised world, against barbarians and psychopaths who care only about power and money.’ A ‘state that is capable of doing this is a criminal, a barbarian, a mass murderer … you can only make peace with human beings … you cannot make peace with a psychopath, with a mass murderer, with a savage, and that is what the state of Israel is.’
The crowd was told to imagine what ‘they’ would do to you if ‘they’ can do this to the Palestinians.
He seemed to disappear into full fat QAnon conspiracy when he said that ‘what we saw in Dublin last week is an alarm bell … these psychopaths are being let off the leash and because Western governments, our government, the European Union tolerate this.’ Here again, the same age-old conspiracy theory of Jewish puppeteers pulling the strings of governments to support their interests, including Israel.
Boyd Barrett refused to withdraw his remarks after he was accused by the Israeli embassy of ‘actions promoting antisemitism and endorsing violence’, saying ‘I abhor every form of racism and antisemitism.’
The President of Ireland, Michael D Higgins, has made a number of problematic statements on the subject of Israel, Gaza and antisemitism. Last May, he accused the Israeli ambassador, Dana Erlich of ‘deliberately suggesting that all people of Jewish belief are now at risk and are being threatened and there is no evidence for this,’ He continued, ‘It is simply something that is a PR exercise by an administration that is guilty of continuing — not historic — continuing breaches of international law as is happening in relation to the events in Gaza. It is absolutely outrageous to be abusing the Jewish community by saying that there is widespread antisemitism’. It is unwise to lecture anyone on the veracity and intensity of their personal experience, not least when you have clearly demonstrated your ignorance about Jewish identity and history.
President Higgins gave the keynote address at this year’s Holocaust Memorial Day commemoration in January. Here again, astonishingly, he invoked the suffering in Gaza. It says much about his reputation among Jews in Ireland that the consensus seemed resigned to the inevitability of his making such a comment. Alas, this September at the UN, President Higgins accused the Israeli Embassy of leaking a letter he had written to the new Iranian president, congratulating him on his new position in tones that were unctuous and fawning, far beyond the requirements of protocol. That the Iranians themselves had posted the letter on both their website and X account did not prevent the President from promoting an old-fashioned conspiracy theory. Perfidious Jews are easier to blame than one’s own pitiful lack of judgement.
In September the Irish Times published a profoundly antisemitic cartoon. Referring to the Israeli attack on Hezbollah, using explosives in pagers, cartoonist Martyn Turner depicts an IDF soldier who looks dirty, sinister and with a large nose, a Jewish caricature which belongs in Der Sturmer. His thought bubble says ‘‘they all hate us so let’s get em’ painting Jews as justifying their place in the world only in terms of victimhood.
The headline above the cartoon reads “When the Country with the biggest chip on its shoulder.” This ignores the reality that Israel is surrounded by Iranian terrorist proxies, Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis who are attacking it simultaneously. How Israel is to be described as having a chip on its shoulder in such circumstances seems to be wilfully blind and biased.
To the right a Hezbollah terrorist is drawn with an exploded pager in his hand out of which comes a large yellow star. The message here could not be more explicit. The yellow star represents the star that Jewish victims of the Holocaust were forced to wear under Nazi occupation and here they are reimagined avenging Nazi crimes by attacking Hezbollah. The layering of inherited trauma onto the Realpolitik of Hezbollah, illegally occupying southern Lebanon in defiance of U.N. resolution 1701, and indiscriminately firing rockets on Northen Israel since 8 October forcing 70,000 Israelis to flee their homes and murdering 12 Druze children is a historical distortion aimed at couching victims of the Holocaust as Israeli perpetrators.
Since the cartoon was published, the conflict has escalated significantly. The UNIFIL force patrolling the buffer zone whose mission is to enforce resolution 1701 have been caught hopelessly ill-equipped between the IDF and Hezbollah. Part of the force comes from Ireland. The Irish President claimed that the IDF were threatening them, a claim that the Irish commander denied, publicly. The president seems unaware that the mission of UNIFIL is to protect the civilians on both sides of the border. There is no mention by him or in the Irish media that it was Hezbollah who murdered Pte Sean Rooney in Lebanon, almost two years ago.
Conclusion
My Holocaust legacy means the perennial question of gauging the safety of my country of residence is never far from my mind. I have always been ready to flee at a moment’s notice. My wife and I have been having these discussions. For her, the now openly expressed antisemitism in Ireland is deeply disturbing. She is not Jewish, and the behaviour of her Irish compatriots continues to shock and disappoint her in equal measure. When we met, I wanted so much to protect her from my own fears, to contain my paranoia. Families like mine do not easily dismiss or downplay antisemitism. Living history tells us the price of that attitude is extortionate.
But sharing a life with a second-generation survivor has its own challenges. Even though it was her encouragement and support that motivated me to tell my family story publicly, I wanted my wife to be spared the very suggestion of my worst fears. The Zeitgeist in Ireland says differently. But to show another face of Limerick, home to the infamous pogrom 120 years ago, Limerick is also my wife’s home town. Her father, a much-loved solicitor was friends with Benjamin Weizmann, the son of Chaim, Israel’s first president and her maternal grandmother often attended the sabbath dinners of their neighbour. Jewish characters were part of their lives, and I was embraced by my in-laws, unconditionally.
Right now, I’m prepared to fight on, to continue to honour the memory of my family. Fleeing my home in Europe because of antisemitism, with the Holocaust still in living memory, cannot be allowed to happen. In Ireland we have no antisemitism watchdogs. Along with my organisation, Holocaust Awareness Ireland, the Jewish Representative Council with links to the World Jewish Congress is a vocal advocate for Jewish rights, highlighting incidents of antisemitism when they occur. But we both run our organisations part time with no government funding. There are only a handful of brave individuals who also challenge the public narrative and speak out. We are outnumbered and overwhelmed.
I want the politicians in Ireland to properly recognise how difficult life has become for Jews living here and for education courses on antisemitism to be mandatory in schools, in universities and the workplace. I want Israel, where half the world’s Jewish population live, to exist. I want an immediate ceasefire in Gaza, a return of the hostages, an end to regional hostilities and a sustainable, just peace settlement for Israelis and Palestinians based on a two-state solution. This makes me neither a spokesman for Israel nor the Palestinians and it certainly does not make me a Nazi. However, that Anti-Zionism has metamorphosized into a new form of antisemitism is no longer a debate.
