My dad might be the only Jew in Ireland who ever got down on bended knee for Jesus.
This happened in our attic in the early 1980s and, in a story shared to laughter at my wedding, he recalled how, in a dual-religion household where all the major holidays of Catholicism and Judaism were celebrated, he ended up on his hands and knees searching for the missing baby Jesus to complete our crib.
His family had embarked on a far greater quest more than eight decades earlier.
My great-grandparents escaped the pogroms in Kyiv and northeast Europe in the early 1900s, fleeing on foot with nothing more than the clothes on their backs, a strong faith in their hearts and the heartbreaking knowledge that family they had no option but to leave behind would be massacred because of their faith.
READ MORE
That harsh journey through an unforgiving eastern European winter, and through many equally harsh and unforgiving towns and cities, changed them, their thinking and their future just as it completely reshaped the future of the generations to come, including my own.
[ The hidden Jewish history at the heart of a Kyiv paintingOpens in new window ]
By the time they found a home in Dublin they were almost broken. They survived but it was a long time before they thrived.
When my paternal grandmother was born in 1915, one of 10 children, my family were established in a tenement in Dublin 8, a leafy, well-heeled address today but a dilapidated heap, verging on a slum, in the early years of the 20th century.
My grandfather’s parents had made the journey from northeastern Europe to England before settling in Ireland, where he changed his name from Hamburg to Harris and started work as a tailor.
By the time my dad was born in 1940, as the Holocaust was reaching its horrific height, the Hamburg-Harris’s were thriving in the suburbs in Rathfarnham, surrounded by family and a wide network of mostly Jewish friends.
Having escaped and survived the pogroms, my great-grandparents were forced to watch from afar as another, almost unimaginably brutal ethnic cleansing unfolded in Germany. Many of their remaining family in Europe were exterminated.
“Never again” was the phrase I remember most from my childhood. “Never again” was said over and over again and was heard at family events and day-to-day. I was aware of the never agains echoing through my house long before I could come close to grasping what the words meant or what their origins were.
I grew up happily half Jewish and recently confirmed through DNA testing that my origins are 50 per cent Ashkenazi Jewish. I share genes with 80 per cent of the remaining Jewish population across the world and I am not so different from them. Growing up in Dublin I was always the different one, in school, in work, in life.
We celebrated Hanukkah and Christmas, Yom Kippur and Easter, Rosh Hashana, Purim and Passover. I fielded questions about what it was like growing up Jewish, how it felt to be Jewish and how I felt about “looking Jewish” because of my big nose. Yes, seriously, I was asked that question more than once.
I am still asked questions today.
Today’s questions are more rooted in curiosity around my views on the current situation in Israel and whether my Jewish heritage influences how I feel about the horrors unfolding in Gaza.
It absolutely does.
My Jewishness makes me more angry and more distraught and it sees me constantly questioning how we, the Jewish people, after all my people have been through and all we have suffered, can let this happen, or stay silent while others let it happen.
I share that anger at what has been happening over the last 21 months with many Irish people who stand against the actions of the Netanyahu government.
The anger Irish people feel has grown and has been very well articulated by President Michael D Higgins, the Taoiseach, the Tánaiste and many others. It is important to stress that the anger and condemnation of the brutality of the Israeli regime does not make Ireland anti-Semitic, as some Israelis and their diplomatic representatives in this country claim. It makes us proudly anti-genocide.
It is important to acknowledge that there are a great many Jewish people in Ireland and in countries all over the world – including Israel – who have been appalled by the horrors the Netanyahu regime has inflicted on the people of Gaza. There are high-profile Jews such as Mandy Patinkin and Hannah Einbinder who are using their voices and profiles to plead with their own communities. Organisations such as Jewish Voice for Peace and IfNotNow have garnered global support and are hugely important in the protest for peace and advocacy. And the chorus of condemnation has grown louder in recent months as images of starving children and news of innocent civilians being targeted by the IDF as they scramble for scraps of food have been shared around the world.
While the responsibility for the deaths of tens of thousands of civilians and the starvation of Gaza rests solely with the Israeli regime and it is unfair to burden all Jews with the horror unfolding, our voices of condemnation might be louder and could travel further.
At home, where my granny lived with us throughout my entire childhood, it could sometimes be intense, with all the “Never agains” ensuring we lived in the shadows of lost lives. Lives that had been extinguished because of their beliefs, their identities, discrimination and hatred towards who they were.
That is why identity has always been important to me.
So, what was it like growing up “half-Jewish”? My memories are filled with the smells of freshly baked challah bread, and cured meats from Baila Erlich’s Kosher butchers on Clanbrassil Street, my granny’s chicken soup, my mum’s pickled meat. There were my cousin’s bar mitzvahs and bat mitzvahs, and later their weddings, and many funerals of great-aunts and uncles. There were dreidels and songs, love and loss, and always the echoes of “Never again”.
The community changed over the years, with many of my family moving away to the UK, the US, Canada and Israel. We stayed, though, and later in life my dad found solace in a progressive community, among like-minded liberal Jews.
He began speaking Hebrew again, something he hadn’t done since school, and he connected with friends from his childhood, and we connected with their children and grandchildren.
When he passed away at the height of Covid, at a time when only 10 people could attend his funeral, the burial happened quickly, as is the tradition, and the burial committee, led by his lifelong friend, gave him the most beautiful send-off in the Dublin mountains. When we finally got to host his memorial among friends and family from the community, it felt secure. And I was able to feel pride in my heritage and in my family’s journey, their beliefs and their faith. I’ve always been proud of the community they fostered and the lives they built away from the horrors to the east.
But over the last few years, something has shifted. I’ve stopped wearing my Star of David. My granny left it to me when she died. I had teethed on it in her arms. I gripped the chain around her neck, and for years I used to wear it every day and considered it a badge of honour.
But it’s no longer a badge of honour to me, and something I can wear with pride. It’s a mark of shame.
Because while not all Jews are standing with the Israeli government, too many are and they should know better. Now is the time – in fact it is long past the time – for Jews in Ireland, and all over the world, to do whatever they can to stop this unfolding genocide. We need Jews here and everywhere to use their voices for peace. More than 60,000 Gazans have been killed, 18,500 children.
[ Ireland is not anti-Semitic but it’s not a good time to be Jewish in this countryOpens in new window ]
I grew up in a house where “Never again” was an article of faith, but this is the again. This is a genocide and we need to use our power and our voices to make it stop.
That is why it is important for the small community of Jews left in Ireland and the wider diaspora all over the world to send emails, post on Facebook, Instagram and TikTok and use their voices to appeal to family in Israel and all over the world. To be silent about what the Israeli government is doing is to be complicit – to a greater or lesser degree – in what most rational people agree are continuing war crimes.
Jews everywhere have to choose which side of history they want to be on. Making the wrong choice will diminish us all.
I’m aware that by writing these words, I’ll alienate members of my family, friends and wider community. I know it will anger many, but fear of alienation and condemnation can no longer be used as an excuse to stay silent in the face of these atrocities.
Does this feel like a break-up letter to all the Jews I’ve loved before? Am I ending it with many in my family? Maybe I am, but if I am they should know, it’s not me, it’s them. Those who remain supportive of what the Israeli government is doing need to take off the homeland-tinted goggles and see this for what it is. A genocide. An extermination. We’ve survived it before, but we cannot make others live through it now and expect not to be tarnished by an eternal shame.
This is not another dinner-table debate about whether Jews have a right to the “homeland” – of course they/we do. Nor is this about whether the British had any business writing and implementing the Balfour Declaration and giving the green light to the displacement of Palestinians without a second thought for their own aspirations – of course they did not.
The time for debating the forces of history that shaped much of the Middle East or the need for a two-state solution has passed or, at least, that debate cannot be conducted in any meaningful fashion when children are dying of hunger because of the actions of Israel. They are being starved, abused and murdered by people who – like me – grew up in homes where “Never again” was the routine refrain.
I am heartbroken to think how devastated my granny and my dad would be at witnessing what is happening in their name. They would be ashamed. I am ashamed.
The world feels heavy right now. I’ve found myself crying while ordering coffee, swallowing how I feel during work meetings and sitting in the car, gathering myself before meeting people. Holidays and celebrations with my family have taken on an air of poignancy. I feel lucky, relieved, sad, guilty on every occasion. Because I know the world keeps turning but it shouldn’t turn like this. We can’t let it be like this. Never again.
[ TCD’s Israeli boycott draws criticism from Ireland’s Jewish communityOpens in new window ]
I am proud of my history but ashamed of my present. How can we be hopeful for our future when atrocities that were supposed to have been consigned to the past are happening again? Happening right now.
The Jewish community in Ireland is small – and getting smaller – but it has a voice nonetheless, and it is a voice that could be amplified in Israel. All too often communications are made by a too-often misrepresentative and misleading Israeli embassy in Dublin. A failure to use that voice to point out that the “Never agains” of my childhood are happening again, because of the cabal of extremists with whom I share a generational history of persecution and genocide, shames all of us. Make it stop.
Sonia Harris Pope is Founder and Managing Director of Harris PR
