Leeside launch for Jewish arts organisation

An evening of live music and poetry will take place on Leeside next month to mark the launch of a new organisation promoting Jewish arts heritage in Ireland.

From Kovno to Cobh will feature performances from international musicians and writers, now mostly resident in Ireland, expressing the immigrant experience of the Irish-Jewish immigrants of the late 1800s and early 1900s.

The event, which takes place at the Cork Arts Theatre on 19 February, will officially launch the newly formed Jewish Arts and Culture Ireland (JACI) and will also feature a live interview with world-renowned Irish Jewish film director Lenny Abrahamson.

JACI was first established in March 2022 by Dublin-based human rights lawyer Saul Woolfson and is a sub-committee of the Jewish Representative Council of Ireland (JRCI).

Ireland’s Jewish community hail from all corners of the world.

The biggest wave of Jewish immigration to Ireland began in the late 1800s when over a million Jews left eastern Europe.

At that time, a few families from Lithuania, from the (then) Kovno region, left their villages and boarded ships to seek a better life in Ireland, some eventually docking in Cobh.

Speaking to the Cork Independent, Cork JACI representative and member of the Cork Jewish community Ruti Lachs said the organisation is there to support not only Jewish artists, but artists and people from other minority communities too.

“There have already been a few events including a welcoming event in Dublin for Ukrainian families that had been housed through the JRCI,” said Ms Lachs.

She said that, although Jewish communities in Cork and around Ireland tend to be very small, a constant influx of Jewish people from other countries coming to work and study in Ireland can help to boost numbers and broaden the community.

Ms Lachs continued: “Because a lot of Israelis and different people, and Brazilian Jewish people, all sorts of people from other places that happen to be Jewish come over to work for companies like Apple, you often have a higher number than ones that a resident here like myself.

“Recently there's a Jewish society started up in UCC. There's quite a few American students over for a year or 2 doing masters or PhDs that happen to be Jewish, so they've formed a Jewish society there which boosts the numbers of Jewish people in Cork, which is nice for us because we don't feel so alone!”