Virtual Tour of Jewish Ireland
Hosted By: My Jewish Learning
Join My Jewish Learning for a look at the Jewish history and contemporary communities in Ireland.
Jews are first documented arriving to Ireland in 1171, but did not become a sizeable population until the arrival of Russian refugees in the late 1800s. Today there are roughly 2,500 Jews living in the Irish Republic with two active synagogues one reform and one Orthodox, both in Dublin. The community is most known for being immortalised in the person of Leopold Bloom, the main character of James Joyce’s Ulysses, a novel with both high accolades and critiques of anti-semitism.
We’ll be joined by tour guide Alexander Vard. Vard was born to a once prominent Dublin Jewish furrier family and grew up in Ireland, Canada and the UK. In 2016 he began a walking tour of Dublin’s Jewish quarter.