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Jewish History in Northern Ireland

By Katrina Goldstone

The first impression on opening up the Belfast Jewish Heritage site is of the plethora of places having Jewish connections and their geographic spread. The site consists of an interactive map with an inventory of locations and further information on those listed contained in the sidebar. In an interview, project director Steven Jaffe admitted, ‘I discovered Jewish families living in towns and villages across Northern Ireland that I never heard of.’ This minority, in a ‘statelet’ riven by denominational strife, consisted of only 1,500 souls at its height, yet all across the map are pins representing the history of the Jewish presence in Northern Ireland. Or rather, certain aspects of it, which tend towards religious leaders and community worthies such as Belfast’s Lord Mayor, Sir Otto Jaffe, whilst also offering tantalising glimpses of more unusual life trajectories.  Down the side of the map are intriguing summaries, which range from the ghoulish to the gnomic. ‘A Jew Hanged at Belfast Jail’ is very much a miscarriage of justice story, with Eddie Cullens found guilty on circumstantial evidence of the murder of his business partner, Ahmet Musa. ‘A Bolshevik in Belfast’ provides a link to a littleknown historical nugget that the Russian revolutionary and Soviet diplomat Maxim Litvinov lived with his sister at Cliftonpark Avenue in North Belfast, from 1908-1910. 

Inevitably, the pins are most densely clustered around Belfast with entries for a mix of businesses, shuls and cemeteries. One of the first flags I was drawn to was for Levey’s Delicatessen, a cave of delights I went to with my father on Sunday mornings, with its jars of pickled cucumber and slabs of smoked salmon. The lone pins in rural areas fascinate. The handkerchief makers in Fivemiletown, the Jewish codebreaker who set up a stocking factory in Strabane. The only Jewish man in seaside Ballycastle sets the imagination alight. The extraordinary tale of philanthropist and educationalist Netta Franklin – and her links to Donegal – also serves to highlight a paucity of women’s stories that is characteristic of much Jewish historiography in the Republic of Ireland, too.  It is good to see pioneer journalists, Judith and Ray Rosenfield remembered here – both worked for local and national newspapers, the Manchester Guardian as well as the Northern Whig

The war years feature vividly, both in terms of the community efforts to support refugees, such as the Millisle Farm initiative to prepare young Jewish refugees for a future life of agricultural work in Palestine, and the afterlives of refugees in Northern Ireland, such as the dancer and writer Helen Lewis. In the Cenotaph Belfast City Hall section, my uncle, Sgt. Pilot Albert Goldstone, RAF 143 squadron, is listed as killed in August 1943. 

The adulatory snapshots of the ‘great and the good’ which tend to dominate such sites, are understandable as choices; however, maps-and-plaques can be a blunt instrument.  In his book The Remembered and the Forgotten, historian Daniel Walkowitz has posed provocative questions in relation to which aspects of Jewish heritage and museum culture become highlighted. As such, the site, as well as making much of Northern Irish Jewish contributions to social history, is also a repository of possibility – a gateway to researching and expanding other stories which have yet to make it onto the map.                                                         

Photo of Millisle women courtesy of Belfast Jewish Heritage

https://www.belfastjewishheritage.org/

 

Jewish History in Northern Ireland is funded under the Northern Ireland Office Shared History fund with support from JCR-UK (Jewish Communities and Records). 

Katrina Goldstone’s book on antifascist and Jewish writers of the 1930s, Irish Writers and the Thirties Art Exile and War is published by Routledge in their Studies in Cultural History series. 

https://www.katrinagoldstone.com/

 

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