AS THEIR husbands talked high politics in Government Buildings, Mrs Sara Netanyahu and Mrs Finola Bruton travelled to Portobello for a lesson in the history of Ireland's Jewish community.
The women spent 45 minutes in the Irish Jewish Museum on Walworth Road yesterday morning. Mrs Netanyahu said she had not known until yesterday that there was a Jewish museum in Ireland. The museum, a synagogue from 1918 to 1977, was opened 11 years ago by the then Israeli president, Dublin born Chairn Herzog.
Mr Stanley Siev of the museum's committee explained that the first Jews to come to Ireland arrived in 1096. Five arrived by sea, possibly from France, and presented gifts to the High King in Limerick. In the 1780s there was an influx from Portugal, Spain and northern France. Most of the ancestors of today's Jewish community came from Russia, Poland and Lithuania in the 1880s and 1890s, Mr Siev explained.
There had been nine synagogues in Ireland, Mr Siev said, and now there were just three. "Do they not pray any more?" Mrs Netanyahu asked. Mr Siev explained that the Jewish community in Ireland was declining in numbers. There had been some intermarriage, some had left Ireland and others - like himself - were getting old.
In 1946 there were 5,381 Jews on the island. Now there are fewer than 1,200.
She asked what the Jewish community in Ireland had done during the war. "We endeavoured to help Jewish people on the Continent, but during the war years we could do nothing."
"But you knew what was happening?" she asked. "When the war ended," replied Mr Siev, "the Irish Government heard about the concentration camps. They donated five million pounds of kosher meat, brought over ritual slaughterers to kill the animals, canned the meat and sent it as gifts to Jewish people in Europe.
A number of survivors of the Holocaust, adults and children, had come to Ireland. Many were put up in Clonee Castle, Co Meath, and later transferred to a training camp in Co Down.
Among the items on display were a bottle of Guinness with its label written in Hebrew, and a scary looking set of metal objects which turned out to be a circumcision set.
Mrs Netanyahu explained another item on display, a Jewish marriage contract in which the husband promises to pay a certain amount of money to his wife in the event of divorce. "It doesn't work if the woman leaves - the man can survive. But in the past when women didn't have jobs, if the man left them they had nothing, so this was to protect them." Women's rights, she explained, were explicit in the Bible.