A Slice of Ireland
A Museum Struggles To Survive
By Marilyn Zeitlin
Forward, March 13, 2007
My 2006 trip to visit Ireland’s Jewish community was a bittersweet reunion. On my first visit to the Emerald Isle in 1987, I discovered that “Irish” and “Jewish” were not contradictory terms, in this country that is more than 98% Catholic.
In 1987, there was palpable pride and excitement in the Jewish population, which numbers about 2,000. At the new Irish-Jewish Museum, the community was planning public performances of a wedding set beneath a chupah, with actors playing the bride, groom and rabbi. The museum had been opened two years earlier — in the building that housed Dublin’s old Walworth Road Synagogue — by Chaim Herzog, the Irish-born president of Israel.
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