A 135-year-old Cork synagogue which closed recently because of falling attendances will now become a Protestant Church. The building on South Terrace was consecrated in 1905. It hosted its final prayer service last month.
The first wave of Jewish emigration to Cork was in 1772 with the influx of a small community of Sephardic Jews from Portugal but relatively little is known about these people. They did not have a synagogue but a burial ground was discovered at Kemp Street, to the back of the recently closed building.
The numbers in the community never exceeded about 40, and it disappeared through intermarriage with local Protestant families.
Written records from 1891 point to the emergence of a second Jewish community in Cork, following the assimilation of the previous Sephardic community. Most of Cork's Jews arrived there from Lithuania in the late 19th century, escaping persecution. It is believed that on arrival in Cork some among them thought they were in New York. By the late 1930s their population had reached a peak of about 450 to 500.
On the island of Ireland currently there are three synagogues in Dublin and one in Belfast, catering to approximately 2,000 Jews.
Irish-born Jews are an ageing population, but there has been an influx of younger Jews with the newer high-tech companies. Most of these, however, are secular and non-practising individuals.
Now the synagogue is set to become a Seventh Day Adventist Church. The Adventist Church has just 35 members and is need of a small place of worship in Cork city. The church, based in Donnybrook in Cork, has had a base in Cork for 15 years. It has some 750 members across Ireland.