Shalom Ireland : A Social History of the Jews in Modern Ireland

Shalom Ireland is a popular account of the social life of Irish Jews from the late nineteenth century to the present day. Most of the story is concentrated in Dublin where almost 90 per cent of the entire Irish Jewish community settled. Until the late nineteenth century, there were only a tiny number of Jews in Ireland, most of them well established on the north side of Dublin. But then came the great influx of Jews into Britain and Ireland, most of them from the Russian Pale of Settlement in search of a better, freer and more tolerant life. It was this community that settled in the area centred on Clanbrassil Street in Dublin’s south inner city, an area that for generations was known colloquially as ‘Little Jerusalem’. Ray Rivlin’s history opens by describing the community in the years immediately after World War II, when the community was at its greatest number, and the rich and varied life it led animated the Clanbrassil Street area. She draws on surviving documents, interviews and her own personal recollections to create this stirring account of a talented, hard-working and profoundly civic community of people, whose contribution to Irish life has been out of all proportion to their numbers. The Jewish community in Ireland, now sadly in decline, is chronicled and celebrated in this delightful book.