Adelaide Road Synagogue, Dublin

La comunidad judía

From 1836 the Dublin Hebrew Congregation used a former Presbyterian chapel at Mary's Abbey. In the 1880s and 1890s Jewish families moved south of the river towards the South Circular Road and beyond, and the congregation decided to build closer to them. Martinus de Groot, president at Mary's Abbey, sat on the building committee. The congregation followed British synagogue customs, which is why the Eastern European families of the 'Little Jerusalem' district called it the English shul. According to Patrick Comerford it had 120 seat-holders or subscribing members in 1895 and 365 by 1944. From the 1960s numbers fell as families moved to Terenure, Rathfarnham and Churchtown, and by the 1990s a typical Saturday morning service drew 40 to 50 people.

Arquitectura y diseño

John Joseph O'Callaghan (c. 1838-1905), a Cork-born Dublin architect trained in the office of Deane and Woodward and otherwise known as a committed Gothic designer, gave the synagogue a loosely Byzantine or Eastern Romanesque dress. The surviving street front, as described by the National Inventory of Architectural Heritage, is a nine-bay, two-storey range over a raised basement, with a five-bay gable-fronted central breakfront under a slate roof. It is built of red brick in Flemish bond banded with polychrome brick and terracotta, with round-headed windows, and its symmetry is stressed by paired arched entrances reached by flights of steps. Behind it lay the prayer hall, which seated 300 people in the main body and 150 in the galleries. The one interior photograph found shows galleries on three sides carried on slender columns with ornate capitals, panelled gallery fronts, an open timber roof with exposed trusses, tall round-headed windows, rows of wooden pews and a central reading platform flanked by tall lamp standards.

La vida dentro de la sinagoga

The synagogue was consecrated on 4 December 1892 by Hermann Adler, newly installed Chief Rabbi of the British Empire, who declared that Ireland was the only country that could not be charged with persecuting the Jews. Services followed British usage under a succession of ministers and readers: Abraham Gudansky served as reader from 1901 and as minister until 1939, and Morris Roith was second reader for some forty-five years. Ephraim Mirvis, later Chief Rabbi of Ireland, was its minister from 1982. In 1915 a mikveh and baths were added, the work supervised by Caldeck and Dunlop to designs by Benjamin Septimus Jacobs of Hull, and in 1925 the building was extended with school rooms for Jewish children. Chaim Herzog, later President of Israel, celebrated his bar mitzvah here, and British Pathé filmed a wedding at the synagogue around 1930. James Joyce mentions the congregation's synagogue 'over in Adelaide road' in Ulysses. The centenary was celebrated in 1992.

Destrucción

The synagogue was never attacked or damaged. Its end came from decline: by the 1990s most members lived in the southern suburbs, and in January 1999 the congregation voted almost unanimously to close the building and merge with the Terenure Hebrew Congregation on Rathfarnham Road. The last services were held that year. The congregation sold the property shortly after closure, for some £6 million according to JCR-UK, and the proceeds were meant for the Terenure site. The new owners redeveloped the plot as offices. The National Inventory of Architectural Heritage records that the building was demolished at the rear in 1999 and a new structure was integrated to the south; Patrick Comerford writes that most of it was demolished apart from the façade. The prayer hall, galleries, interior fittings and the later mikveh and school wing were all lost. The sources consulted do not name the buyer, the developer or the demolition contractor.

El destino de la comunidad

The Adelaide Road congregation did not come to a violent end. After the 1999 vote its members moved to the synagogue of the Terenure Hebrew Congregation at Rathfarnham Road, built in 1953, where the two congregations worshipped together. On 15 December 2004 they held simultaneous general meetings and agreed a complete merger, and on 25 January 2005 the combined Dublin Hebrew Congregation held its first council meeting, carrying on the name of the community that had built Adelaide Road. The decline that closed the building followed the move of Dublin's Jewish families from the streets near Adelaide Road to the southern suburbs, which left the old synagogue far from where most members lived. A Torah scroll mantle from Adelaide Road is now kept in the Irish Jewish Museum in Portobello, in the former Walworth Road synagogue, one of the few movable objects from the building whose whereabouts are recorded in the sources consulted.

El lugar hoy

Only the street front of the synagogue stands. The nine-bay polychrome brick façade on Adelaide Road, with its central gable, round-headed windows and paired arched doorways reached by steps, was kept when the rest of the building was demolished in 1999. The prayer hall, galleries, mikveh and school wing behind it are gone, and the plot is now an office development: the National Inventory of Architectural Heritage, which recorded the façade in 2017 and rates it of national importance, lists it as the offices of the Communications Clinic at 36 Adelaide Road, with a modern block joined to its south side and taller office buildings rising behind. The doorways now serve as office entrances. No part of the interior survives in place.

Nombres destacados