Jewish Ireland

A Jewish Leprechaun!!! Carl Nelkin.

by Sharon Udasin
Staff Writer

Standing on the bima behind a golden menorah, an emerald green leprechaun read from the megillah last Purim, a plush green top hat perched on his head and a red Irish-chasidish beard glued onto his flushed cheeks.

Carl Nelkin, a native of Dublin, prays regularly at the Dublin Hebrew Congregation – Terenure Synagogue, the Irish capital’s main Orthodox shul, and has been a guest cantor in Laredo, Texas; New York City and England. An aviation lawyer by day and recording musician by night, he uniquely blends Celtic and Yiddish melodies to create albums available nowhere else. Inspired by both the great Irish tenor John McCormick and Toronto Cantor Louis Danto, Nelkin released his first bicultural CD in 2003, entitled “Irish Heart – Jewish Soul -

Carl Nelkin (center) reads Megillah; Rabbi Lent wears the red feathers (right). Carl Nelkin.

 avourite Irish and Jewish Songs.” And in January, after accumulating more than 25 years of learning about the Holocaust, he unveiled a second album, “The Little Trees Are Weeping – Songs of the Holocaust and Resistance.” Though he felt emotionally compelled to create the Holocaust memorial album, Nelkin feels that he has carved out more of a niche for himself in the quite rare Irish-Jewish music market.

“I wanted to show a blending of Irish and Jewish culture through music,” Nelkin said, noting that Dublin has about 1,500 Jewish residents. “I interpret the Yiddish music with Irish instruments. They both have a history of persecution, they both have a history of trying to establish their own state.” Continue reading…

Raphael Siev, Irish Jewish Museum curator. Rachel King.

by Sharon Udasin

For any visitor to Dublin’s rustic Irish Jewish Museum, the warm-natured, red-bearded curator Raphael Siev was more than a familiar face: he was a fount of information and an admired Irish-Jewish leader.

Siev, 73, died of a short illness in the last week of January, during which he had insisted upon speaking at a Holocaust memorial event, The Independent newspaper in Dublin reported.

“Thousands of people went through the museum,” said Rabbi Zalman Lent, spiritual leader at the Dublin Hebrew Congregation and Chabad emissary to Ireland. 

The museum, formerly the Walworth Road Synagogue, opened its doors in 1985, in an inauguration led by Chaim Herzog, the Irish-born former president of Israel and son to Ireland’s first chief rabbi, Siev had told a group of Columbia Journalism graduate students when they visited the museum a year ago. Continue reading…