Nadene Goldfoot
Count George Noble Plunkett (3 December 1851 – 12 March 1948) was an Irish nationalist politician, museum director and biographer, who served as Minister for Fine Arts from 1921 to 1922, Minister for Foreign Affairs from 1919 to 1921 and Ceann Comhairle of
During July 1921 Count George Noble Plunkett, Dáil minister for foreign affairs, wrote a long letter to Éamon de Valera. In it Plunkett warned the Sinn Féin
leader that republicans should be wary of too close a relationship with ‘the Jews’.
Anglo-Irish Treaty: Signed on December 6, 1921, this treaty established the Irish Free State as a dominion within the British Empire. The treaty gave the 26 counties of Ireland a parliament and significant fiscal autonomy. Plunkett must have been feeling pretty frisky.
Plunkett was influenced by religious anti-Semitism, conspiracy theories regarding Jewish power and anti-immigrant sentiment. But does his letter tell us anything about republican attitudes more widely? Anti-Semitism in Ireland remains a controversial subject. In one narrative, the 1904 Limerick ‘pogrom’ looms large, while the anti-Semitism of Sinn Féin’s founder Arthur Griffith and the IRA’s dealings with Nazi Germany are linked to modern-day republican hostility to Israel.
Starting with 1904: The Limerick boycott, also known as the Limerick pogrom, was an economic boycott waged against the small Jewish community in Limerick, Ireland, between 1904 and 1906. It was accompanied by assaults, stone throwing and intimidation, which caused many Jews to leave the city. It was instigated in 1904 by a Redemptorist priest, Father John Creagh. According to a report by the Royal Irish Constabulary, five Jewish families left Limerick "owing directly to the agitation" while another 26 families remained.
A small number of Lithuanian Jewish tradespeople, fleeing persecution in their homeland, began arriving in Limerick in 1878. They formed an accepted part of the city's retail trade, centred on Colooney Street (now Wolfe Tone Street). The community established a synagogue and a cemetery in the 1880s. Easter Sunday of 1884 saw the first of what were to be a series of sporadic violent antisemitic attacks and protests. The wife of Lieb Siev and his child were injured by stones and her house damaged by an angry crowd for which the ringleaders were sentenced to hard labour for a month. In 1892 two families were beaten and a stoning took place on 24 November 1896.
In 1903, a reception was held in Limerick to mark the emigration of Bernard Wienronk to South Africa. The former Mayor of Limerick John Daly was asked to preside. He proposed a toast on the night to "Israel a Nation" Many details about Limerick's Jewish families are recorded in the 1901 census that shows most were pedlars, though a few were described as drapery dealers and grocers.
Many Lithuanian Jews had moved to Ireland, including our relatives, the Goldfus/Goldfoot line. They had first gone to Great Britain, then Ireland, and finally South Africa, where my grandfather had chosen the USA instead.
My grandfather, Nathan Goldfus/Goldfoot, left Ireland on June 9, 1893 and headed for Winnipeg, Canada. Nathan had been living at 13 Arbutus Place, South Circular Road, Dublin Ireland in 1893 when he married Lena Goldberg. He must have divorced her, for he met our Bubba, Zlata Jermulowski, born in Lazdijai, Suwalki, Lithuania, but had eventually moved to Poland. She finally got to the USA through Idaho.
In 1936, he testified in front of the Peel Commission in London and participated in 1939 in the "London Conference of 1939" between Jews and Arabs from Mandatory Palestine, convened by the British government.
During the Arab Revolt, he called, together with other rabbis, for adherence to the Havlagah policy of the Haganah and for avoidance of acts of revenge.
Nathan left this address, at least 4 months later after February 21, 1893 when he married Lena.
The first Chief Rabbi of Ireland, Isaac Herzog, was born and raised in Ireland and his mother was born in Egypt; their families were of Eastern European Jewish descent (from Poland, Russia, and Lithuania). He has two brothers and a sister. His paternal grandfather, Rabbi Yitzhak HaLevi Herzog, was the first Chief Rabbi of Ireland, a post he held from 1922 to 1935, and Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi of Israel from 1936 to 1959. The third foreign minister of Israel, Abba Eban, was his uncle.
Herzog served as rabbi of Belfast from 1916 to 1919 and was appointed rabbi of Dublin in 1919. A fluent Irish speaker, he supported the First Dáil and the Irish republican cause during the Irish War of Independence, and became known as "the Sinn Féin Rabbi".
Isaac (Yitzhak) "Bougie" Herzog was born in Tel Aviv. He is the son of Major-General Chaim Herzog, who served two terms as the Sixth President of Israel from 1983 to 1993, and Aura Ambache, founder of the Council for a Beautiful Israel.
On 21 November 2024, the UN-backed International Criminal Court (ICC) issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defence Minister Yoav Gallant. Herzog condemned the ICC's decision, saying, "It ignores Hamas’s cynical use of its own people as human shields. It ignores the basic fact that Israel was barbarically attacked and has the duty and right to defend its people. It ignores the fact that Israel is a vibrant democracy, acting under international humanitarian law, and going to great lengths to provide for the humanitarian needs of the civilian population."
Mary Therese Winifred Robinson (Irish: Máire Mhic Róibín; née Bourke; born 21 May 1944) is an Irish politician who served as the seventh president of Ireland, holding the office from December 1990 to September 1997. She was the country's first female president. In 2009, she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Obama, the highest civilian honour awarded by the US. The award was criticised by American and European Jewish groups, while others offered support. Parties opposed included the 1. AIPAC, 2. Anti-Defamation League, 3. European Jewish Congress, and 4. John Bolton, former US Ambassador to the UN. Bolton stated that those in the administration who recommended her either ignored her anti-Israel history, or missed it entirely. Mary Robinson welcomes the decision by International Criminal Court Prosecutor Karim Khan to apply for arrest warrants against Hamas leaders and Israel's Prime Minister and Defence Minister.
The Durban Review Conference, also known as Durban II, was a United Nations World Conference Against Racism (WCAR) held in Geneva, Switzerland from April 20–24, 2009: Durban’s racism-turned-racist conference that disgraced the UN.” "To many of us present at the events at Durban Conference-- , it is clear that much of the responsibility for the debacle rests on the shoulders of UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Mary Robinson, who, in her role as secretary-general of the conference, failed to provide the leadership needed to keep the conference on track.
For example, Robinson failed to confront the odious anti-Israel language adopted at the Tehran pre-conference of February 2001:
By appearing to condone the Asian conference’s efforts to place the Israeli-Palestinian conflict on the agenda of the World Conference, she betrayed its intentions and emboldened those intent on using the conference for their own political purposes. From that moment the conference began to take a dangerous trajectory that became ever more difficult to correct.
Mrs. Robinson’s intervention with the assembled delegates later in the same day left our delegation deeply shocked and saddened. In her remarks, she advocated precisely the opposite course to the one Secretary Powell and I had urged her to take. Namely, she refused to reject the twisted notion that the wrong done to the Jews in the Holocaust was equivalent to the pain suffered by the Palestinians in the Middle East. Instead, she discussed “the historical wounds of anti-Semitism and of the Holocaust on the one hand, and…the accumulated wounds of displacement and military occupation on the other.”
Resource:
Update: One of Fox News hosts briefly mentioned this topic. He said he was Irish and ashamed because of their antisemitism. That Irish newscaster’s name is Brian Kilmead!
***** update on Republican party anti-Semitism in Ireland: https://www.politico.eu/article/in-ireland-sinn-fein-embraces-palestinians-and-shuns-israel/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Robinson
https://unwatch.org/something-about-mary/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1921_in_the_United_Kingdom
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limerick_boycott
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