Jewish people in Ireland are being constantly told their right to stay in the country depends on how they feel about Israel, an October 7th commemoration has been told.
Three hundred people turned up at the Reform Synagogue in Rathgar, south Dublin, to mark the third anniversary of the Hamas-led attacks that left 1,200 Jewish people in Israel dead and 250 taken hostage to Gaza.
The subsequent war in Gaza has killed more than 74,000 people, according to the Hamas-controlled Gaza health ministry,
Sunday night’s event was the subject of tight security with a Garda presence outside and was not publicly advertised.
Orli Degani, the incoming chair of the Jewish Representative Council of Ireland, said they had to close registration such was the demand for the event. Degani said interest in the event was not surprising.
“We all feel the need to be together, to be somewhere where we don’t have to explain ourselves, where we don’t have to defend our grief or justify our fears,” she said.
“After October 7th, hostility for Jews had already begun spreading and it has never stopped. We have watched Jewish people being pushed out of ordinary life, social spaces, workplaces, cultural activities and public conversations.
“We have watched people become afraid to say they are Jewish. We watched our community being told, again and again, that whether we belong or not in Ireland depends on how we feel about Israel.
“It has become normal now, three years later, that we are asked to put October 7th into context, to qualify our grief.”
The event also heard from Alexandra Herzog, the granddaughter of former Israeli president Chaim Herzog, who was born in Belfast and raised in Dublin.
She said the fraught relationship between Ireland and Israel was “particularly painful” to her as “Ireland is woven into my family history”.
She said her great-grandfather, Rabbi Yitzhak Herzog, had been a friend of Éamon de Valera’s and a supporter of Irish independence.
Her grandfather Chaim had come back to Ireland in 1985, as president of Israel, to the country “that had shaped him. When my grandfather returned to Ireland at a time when Ireland and Israel had serious disagreements, he said Ireland was not merely the country in which he was born.
“It represented a set of values which he acquired and remained with him throughout his life.
“Ireland and Israel do not have to agree, but political disagreements should never be permission to demonise a people. It should never lead to hostility to Israelis or to Jewish people in Ireland having to answer for the government thousands of miles away.”
The event also heard from family members of those killed in the October 7th, 2023, attacks and from the Irish-born chief operating officer of the World Jewish Congress, John Malkinson.
Malkinson said the attacks on Jewish people in October 7th shocked the world, but in many places by October 8th “sympathy had evaporated – we here in Ireland felt that more than most”.