From the Pale of Settlement to Cork County to Brooklyn

At its start, this project was about understanding migration routes of Eastern European Jews to and through Ireland in the late 19th and early 20th century. By beginning with my own family’s uncommon emigration route from Lithuania through Ireland and eventually to Brooklyn, NY I researched the small number of Jews who found their way to Ireland. The bulk of this project’s research was on Jewish communities in Dublin and Cork which grew to their largest size during the emigration of Jews from the Russian Pale of Settlement. While small, these communities were centered around thriving Synagogues and many immigrants were able to translate their labor skills acquired in Eastern Europe into jobs such as tailoring or peddling. Broader circumstances such as these are known, but I hoped to understand what life was like in Ireland for these emigre communities on a deeper level and the push/pull factors contributing to people staying or continuing on to a secondary migration journey. There is a very limited body of scholarly literature on Jews in late 19th and early 20th century Ireland and I hope to be able to add to the academic conversation with my research. 

It is not known why my family and others immigrated through Ireland on their way from Lithuania to the United States. However, since my paternal Great-Grandmother Eva Klein was born and lived in Ireland for three years my Dad and Uncle are able to obtain Irish citizenship. I'll very well never know the whole story, although I did uncover fragments of it through this research. It is these fragments that I’ve collected and woven into an incomplete tapestry of the past. The tapestry can only be finished with new fabrics and thread, which are the present Jewish communities in Ireland and the descendents of those who moved away. 

This project began with the acquisition of my Great-Grandmother Eva Klein’s Irish birth certificate and record of immigration through Ellis Island (see Appendix 3 and 5). So at its core, the research is based in archival work and analyzing documents, letters and photographs. Thus, I visited the Irish Jewish Museum in Dublin and the Cork City Archives. I scheduled my visits ahead of time and communicated with the archivists about what collections I was interested in looking at. After returning home, I found that the best way to research this was online with Ancestry.com and other similar archival websites.

In the CC History department we are taught to understand the limits of information discovered in institutional archives. Therefore, I will problematize what the archives can and can't tell us about the experience of Jewish folks in Ireland. One guiding question for those doing archival work must always be: What records were not kept or even created in the first place? We must understand that all the answers to our inquiries are not stored in archives. Therefore, there are certain alternative or non-traditional ways of preserving this history such as oral history projects, guided walking tours of Jewish Quarters and modern museum exhibits that visited. In conclusion, this inquiry is about using archives to research Jewish life in late 19th and early 20th century Ireland, but also a critical exploration of how these stories are preserved outside of the archive in more publicly available forms.

The literary tradition of Ireland is not limited to simply Catholic or Protestant experience. In fact, one of the most famous pieces of Irish literature is Ulysses by James Joyce which features Leopold Bloom, a Dubliner of Jewish descent. Leopold Bloom to this day acts as the primary (fictional, I may add) representation of Irish Jews and is still celebrated every June 16th on Bloomsday. However, there is much more varied fictional and non-fictional representation of Jews in Irish publications. As part of this project, I decided to dig deeper and complete a literary review which provided a base understanding of Irish Jewish history before I visited. I've also listed the just-for-fun books I was reading during the project which inspired my next steps.

Reimagining the Jews of Ireland by Zuleika Rodgers and Natalie Wynn Jewish Ireland in the Age of Joyce by Cormac O Grada The Golden Age Shtetl: A New History of Jewish Life in East Europe by Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern --Jewish Ireland: A Social History by Ray Rivlin Bad Jews: A History of American Jewish Politics and Identities by Emily Tamkin

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Klay by Michael Chabon One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez Habilis by Alyssa Quinn

Stories of immigration are foremost held, retold and retained in the family sphere. Even in their inaccuracies (I might argue because of) these stories contain insight into family history. What remains retold or emphasized can speak to the process of assimilation a family undergoes when immigrating. My family was only transiently a part of Jewish life in Ireland, but they joined established synagogues and were welcomed into the existing Jewish community in Cork. One of the reasons Jews have been able to adapt to continual emigration is the social structure of Jewish life that is recreated wherever they resettle. Of course this is with adaptations, but when the Jews of Akmene, Lithuania heard there were Jewish communities in Ireland they knew they would be supported by those who had already established themselves in the country. 

The Jewish communities across Ireland are quickly disappearing as a result of the elderly passing away, emigration and assimilation. Those remaining are working to continue Jewish practice and ensure they will be remembered in the historical memory of Ireland. Many of these projects include genealogy which can create a direct connection to Ireland for those researching their family histories, such as what happened with mine. There are a few museum spaces in Ireland that publicly feature Jewish stories. There were also community members who were eager to share their history in an informal setting.

The Irish Jewish Museum, located in a former synagogue built in the 1870s in the historically Jewish neighborhood Portobello, was founded in 1984 after the synagogue had been in disuse for almost fifteen years. The museum was started and run by a small group of dedicated members of the community, most who had grown up Jewish in Dublin. The museum has a collection too big for the tiny space allotted, which creates a feeling of being in your grandparents basement. The feeling was heightened by my two grandparent aged tour guides, Hilary Abrahmson and Edwin Alkin. They were able to provide anecdotes about people in black and white photos who had long since passed but they knew as children. Hilary fondly remembered attending synagogue as a young girl with Estella Solomons, an accomplished artist and IRA member during the Irish War of Independence. Hilary was also able to tell her own family history to me in a beautiful anecdote. I’d like to note that this is my retelling of a story I heard in passing and I can’t confirm the accuracy of the details. Despite the unconfirmed “truth” of the content there is still importance in the exchange of family stories.

Hilary Abrahmson’s Grandfather emigrated to Dublin from Russia in the mid 1800s at the age of twelve. He got work as a peddler selling holy pictures and relics to Catholics (a common line of work for new Jewish immigrants). He received a large order from the head nun of a convent. When he returned a week later with the requested goods, the nun said she had already bought them from somebody else. Hilary’s grandfather was distraught. It was Friday, Shabbat was about to begin, and he was relying on the income from this order. The priest came across him crying on the steps of the church and asked him what had happened. After he explained the priest was convinced of the poor boy's struggle and he called on the head nun to buy what she had ordered. The priest then invited the boy in for lunch. When the priest asked what he wanted he simply asked for a boiled egg. Mistaking his requests of a Kosher lunch for a Catholic avoidance of meat on Fridays the priest thought he was a good Catholic boy. However, when they got to talking the priest found out the boy was Jewish. As was normal for the time, the priest had never met a Jew before but had no ill will towards him. They finished lunch and the boy was invited to return the next week and the next week after that. Eventually the priest’s family took him in and supported him like their other children, even putting him through school.

My other guide, Edwin Alkin, was less concerned with showing us around the museum than interrogating us on our opinions about Israel, always a relevant topic but especially pressing since Ireland had just formally recognized Palestine as a state. I disagreed with his virulently conservative takes on Israel, but nonetheless he still recognized me as a Jewish person with my own opinions. At the end of my visit he reminded me that we are still family even if we disagree. I’d like to imagine this respect is informed by the complicated relationship of Jewry in any country to Israel and the acceptance of differing opinions on the future of Jews. Although, after leaving the museum he did send me a podcast about how U.S. universities are being turned Anti Semitic and anti-Israel by Arab funders. So, it seems we will never stop trying to convince each other of the opposing side.

In no way was the Irish Jewish Museum completely clear or comprehensive. There are some much needed renovations and updated information. Yet, because of the lack of a clear political narrative about the Irish Jewish Community it opens itself up as a space to be contested. Contestation of the histories shown and around current events. The curators did not (and I don’t think possibly could) craft an argument about Irish Jews as a monolith which I deeply appreciate. This aspect of the museum perfectly mirrors the centuries of Irish Jews balancing the complicated nature of their national and religious identities with political, class, and social positionalities.

A background question I held with me during my museum visits was: How are family stories of immigration/emigration shared with the public and tied into the larger national Irish narrative? Ireland has many public displays and museums about immigration, but specifically emigration of Irish people to other places. For example, EPIC the Irish Immigration Museum is one of the biggest attractions in Dublin and they encourage visitors to trace their own diasporic roots back to Ireland. But what about the stories of communities moving to Ireland for opportunity? 

The Cork City Museum features a few exhibitions about people coming to the port city for possibilities including a small exhibit called “The Tsars, the Rosehills and the Music Shop '' about the Cork Jewish community. The last synagogue in Cork closed in 2016 and this exhibit was put on permanent display in the city museum a year after. Thus, it reads as an obituary for the Cork Jewish community and ends with a moving quote from Fred Rosehill, a stalwart member of the community:

...we've been here 120 years, we've moved on. It's not the community is gone, the community is elsewhere.

The exhibit is only a tiny corner of the museum, but covers a lot. Focusing on a few specific families from Akmene, Lithuania, the exhibit traces the Jewish community from the 1880s till 2016. It begins by sharing the multiple myths or stories of how Jews ended up in Cork which at this point are a motif in my research. According to the estimates from the exhibit, when my Great-Great-Great Grandparents Solomon Henry and Janie Clein (they also sometimes used the spelling Klein) moved to Cork in 1898(ish) there were probably around 250 Jews there. They came from Dublin presumably so that they could be one step closer to Ellis Island. Henry’s brothers didn’t move to Cork and all stayed in the U.K or Ireland.

Another relic displayed is a cloth embroidered with the names of all the Cork congregation members including an in memory of section and four children who had been born outside Ireland. It is a simple yet beautiful piece of work handmade by the Cork Daughters of Zion in the Hebrew year of 5710 (1949/50). One must wonder if the year has significance. The tapestry was presented only one or two years after Israel declared its statehood. Did they want to record all of these names because they were already predicting the decline of the community as families might have emigrated to Israel?

The Cork Jews were a tiny, but present, community that despite the establishment of Israel in 1948 actually flourished in the 1950s and ended up producing Cork’s Lord Mayor in 1977. However, even as they celebrate the political influence of the Cork Jewish Community, today the synagogue is now closed and the Torah sits behind glass to be looked at but not read.

Sweny’s Pharmacy (as in the one featured in Ulysses) is not technically a museum, but is basically one. Located on the backside of Trinity College Dublin, Sweny’s sells books and souvenirs and holds readings of James Joyce almost every day. My family walked in thirty minutes before closing and were greeted by the infamous PJ who has been working at Sweny’s and organizing readings of James Joyce for many years. Immediately we got to talking about our family history and he explained that like one of his favorite characters Leopold Bloom, he is Jewish. His family came to Ireland in the 1200s as moneylenders and have stayed in Dublin ever since. He was so ecstatic to hear about my research project that after sharing the book Dublin’s Little Jerusalem by Nick Harris with me he serenaded us in Portuguese. I appreciated this unplanned exchange of family histories and appreciation of art that grows out of cultural exchange.

About a week before my family left for Ireland my dad received a Whatsapp message from a random Irish woman named Helena Whitston saying that she believed she was related to us. The Irish Jewish Genealogical Society had connected her with my uncle who then gave her my dad’s info. We decided we would meet up with her when we were in Dublin and of course asked her for recommendations in the city. Helena grew up in Dublin but now lives just outside the city, so we met her and her daughter Robyn for lunch at one of her favorite pubs. Once we had ordered our food and all had a pint of Guinness in front of us she told us how she had found out we were connected in lineage. 

Nobody in the family knew (or spoke about) who the parents of Helena’s grandfather Henry Claine were. So she and her mother had been trying to figure out who his father was for decades without any leads. Eventually she took a DNA test and learned she was a percentage Jewish which was surprising because to her knowledge she was wholly Irish Catholic. This made her think that maybe her Grandfather’s father had been Jewish. After scouring Ancestry.com and other genealogical databases she connected her roots to the Klein family which led her to believe her Great-Grandfather Harry Clein was my dad’s Great-Grandfather Solomon Henry Klein’s brother.

A note: Members of the family used Clein and Klein interchangeably. This might be because of how certain recorders chose to spell their name or an active choice to change it to being spelled with a C so it seemed less German.

The story begins in the early 1890s when Tessy and Mordechai Klein of Akmene, Lithuania sent off their five sons, Solomon Henry, Louis Hyman, Harry, Isaac and Morris to Dublin, Ireland. Solomon Henry met Janie Bloom whom he married in 1894. They had three kids in Dublin and then moved to Cork in 1898 (Appendix 2). The rest of the brothers stayed in Dublin and some eventually moved to Manchester.

I think it is fair to say that from what the records show, Harry Clein was the black sheep of the family. He had two children with Mary Ellen Stafford, a Catholic woman, out of wedlock. This would have been at the time completely impermissible to both religious sides of the family. Their son Henry (b. 1905) and daughter Anne (b.1907) were raised by their Catholic grandparents, Anne and Thomas Stafford. One can assume that Mary did not agree with the arrangement to be estranged from her children, but had no ability to refuse.

Both Harry and Mary have Jail records in Dublin. Harry was sentenced to a months imprisonment in Kilmainham jail for larceny in cahoots with the cook at the manor where he worked. Harry listed his brother Louis as next of kin on the prison acceptance log. (Appendix 6) At the age of 19, Mary was held in the Mountjoy prison in 1906 for larceny of a gold bracelet (Appendix 7). She eventually emigrated through Ellis Island to the U.S. in 1909. Harry moved to Manchester, possibly to be with his brother Morris, and died in 1912. Neither of them ever reunited with their children.

My Great-Great Grandparents Solomon and Janie left Cork on October 4th 1903 with Joseph (8), Ben (6), Sarah (4) Eva (3) and Percy and Louis who were either infants or not born yet. After the long journey, they arrived at Ellis Island on March 19th, 1904 and from there settled in Brooklyn. They continued to have children each of which had their own families, some staying in New York and others moving away such as my Great-Grandmother Eva who spent the end of her life in Dade County, Florida.

My family was able to leave Akmene, which was completely destroyed during the Holocaust, and settle in the UK and U.S. because of a bit of luck and a lot of privilege. Judaism being labeled as a race has a tenuous history linked with eugenics and anti-semitism, but also Jewish self-determination and exceptionalism. When my family arrived in Ireland and then subsequently the U.S. they were labeled as Russian and were treated as white immigrants, facing less discrimination than groups such as Chinese immigrants who had been subjected to horrible treatment before and then by law after the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was enacted. They found a place in the already established Jewish community in Queens and easily entered the economy. My ancestors were deemed worthy enough to be recorded in records and then those records were important enough to be kept. This is not the case for many people who were either forcefully taken to different countries or their immigration was not legal and therefore not recorded. 

It is true that Jews were subject to increased discrimination and immigration restriction but this was after my family had immigrated and established themselves in New York City. The restrictions were buoyed by the Immigration Act of 1924 which placed specific quotas on immigrant groups, based on racist notions. The rise of the second Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s also contributed to the targeting of Jews, not to mention Black Americans. The immigration quotas were not adjusted during WWII and the U.S. refused to grant asylum to many Jews trying to escape the Holocaust. A tragedy I still don’t think the country has faced head on as it was overshadowed by our victory against the axis powers. 

I thought about who’s family’s histories are recorded as I went to the Cork City Archives. I requested to look at the 2013 edition of “Heritage” The A-Z DNA of CORK JEWRY which is, “a biographical directory of 1,696 Irish Jewish names in family format including birth, marriage, burials with inscriptions & Hebrew names, 1901 and 1911 census, school enrolment (sic), occupations and address, of CORK Irish Jewry, ascendents and descendents.” This behemoth of a book bound in red leather is part of the Jewish Ireland Series which the leading Irish Jewish genealogist Stuart Rosenblatt has spent the last 18 years of his life working on. While these books are open to the public in Ireland at varying archives and museums, they cannot be used in academic research without the permission of Stuart Rosenblatt himself as it denotes on the inside cover. Luckily, the book was of less use than other avenues of research. 

The Irish Jewish Genealogical Society, which is run by Stuart Rosenblatt and a division of the Irish Jewish Museum, has a website that is paywalled and costs around $30 per birth, marriage or death record. Ancestry.com and other genealogical sources are also paywalled, adding another obstacle for people trying to trace their histories. These online archives have done wonders for accessing information, but I think it should be free to all and records should be in the hands of communities they belong to. This doesn’t mean one person or organization should be able to monopolize the genealogical data.

While in Dublin, we met up with a family who used to be our neighbors in Denver and attended the same synagogue. In the mid 2010’s they took their two young children and moved to Dublin and have lived there ever since.  Moving to Ireland did not mean they ceased practicing religion. In fact, Hilary Abrahmson, from the Irish Jewish Museum, was the tutor for the eldest’s Bar Mitzvah. The mom is closer to her family in the EU and doing research at Trinity College Dublin while the dad has found work in the booming Irish tech industry. 

My dad has gotten his Irish (and therefore EU) citizenship mostly just to have it, but he’ll joke about moving to Ireland in case the U.S. collapses. After visiting Ireland he is increasingly more serious about moving to Cork. Jewish trauma manifests itself in always having an escape route, which my dad has now found. I understand this inherent fear, but I can’t help and analyze the safety of our family in this country for over 100 years and think that maybe we need to stay. Not to prove we’ve found our homeland, but because we’ve assimilated into a position of privilege where we have the leverage to fight for the rights of immigrants who are not as fortunate as we were.

This project was part scouring archives and part collecting stories. Some stories happened to be triggered by the archive and others which were still shared orally. In this project I’m writing down my family’s story to be remembered. Unavoidably, that means these stories are also being reimagined by me. According to the traditional scholarship of History my transgression is inserting myself into the story. But how can I not when it's my family I’m researching? 

Critical fabulation, theorized by Saidiya Hartman, is a method of non-traditional archival engagement that functions speculatively, therefore holding room for complexities of descendent communities whose trauma is partly stored in archives. The practice of critical fabulation lives in a paradox, “It is a history of an unrecoverable past; it is a narrative of what might have been or could have been; it is a history written with and against the archive.” 

It is within this paradox that I want to write a historical, yet also fictional account of my family history from Akmene, Lithuania to the present. I was inspired by fabulous works of historical fiction I read while doing this research and was drawn to the magical possibilities of reinventing the past and relating it to my present. My first block in the fall is “Writing Personal Nonfiction” and I hope to work on this project during that class.