‘If my grandparents hadn’t left Poland I wouldn’ t be here now’
Two Northern Irish Jewish people explain why the horrors of the Holocaust still resonate with them — and warn about the rise of anti-Semitism today
Steven Jaffe, co-chair of Friends of Israel, who grew up in Belfast but now lives in London, says that in the Seventies and Eighties there was a thriving Jewish community in the north of the city.
“I grew up in north Belfast,” he says. “Then there was a significant Jewish community there. At the time there was around 250 people there, in the Seventies and early Eighties.
“The synagogue is up in north Belfast on the Somerton Road. When I was growing up there was a Kosher butchers — for Jewish meat — and there was a delicatessen that specialised in Jewish food, all along that stretch of the Antrim Road.
“It was a small, but very vibrant and close-knit Jewish community that I was brought up in.”
Steven’s ancestors hailed from Poland, a place he visited recently and was reminded that had they not left, his family history would have been among the ashes in the nearby concentration camp.
“My great grandparents emigrated from Poland in the late 1800s,” he says. “They came to Belfast from the city of Lublin, which is around 100 miles south of Warsaw. When my great grandfather left, there were 40,000 Jews living in Lublin. And when I visited the city in the Eighties, there is a huge concentration camp there called Majdanek. It is literally about 15 minutes from the city centre.
“While I was there I stared into this deep collection of ashes which were the only remains of over 100,000 people who were murdered there. That is where my family came from. It was my great grandparents who moved away from there, my grandparents moved to Belfast as children. And that was very common within the Belfast Jewish community. Most of the members came from Eastern Europe and they would have arrived in what is now Northern Ireland in the late 19th and early 20th Century, as part of a big wave of emigration. Well over a million Jews left Eastern Europe, most of them went to America.
“That would have been before the Second World War. My mother was eight-years-old during the war. Over a million Jewish children were killed during the Holocaust. So you just think, that would have been our future had my family stayed there. I wouldn’t be here today.
“My family went from Poland to Belfast, but my great grandfather could never settle there. He thought that there was security in the big numbers. There were 40,000 Jews in Lublin, all the traditions in that community went back centuries. After landing in Belfast in 1890, he brought all the family back to Lublin in 1906, but then left again for Belfast, making the journey back again and making Northern Ireland his family’s home. On that very decision hangs the fact that I am here.
“The towns and villages that the Belfast Jews came from became the killing fields of the Holocaust,” he says. “They were right at the centre of it in Lithuania and in Poland. This is where Jewish people were murdered literally by the millions.”
Steven says growing up in Belfast, his Jewish faith and identity were nurtured and allowed to thrive. However, he says that modern society has allowed a dangerous anti-Semitic element to grow.
“Mine was a strong identity that never leaves me,” he says. “The Northern Ireland side of things as well as Jewish side. I live in London now, but I am back so many times during the year, in some ways I never left Belfast. Growing up during the Troubles in north Belfast, such a troubled area, I think the Jewish community were respected across the sectarian divide. And the synagogue in Belfast was a place where Protestants and Catholics could meet in a neutral environment. We were very much part of the local community, but kept our distinctive faith and identity. But the vast majority of my friends when I was growing up would not have been Jewish. The community was quite small, there were about 150 of us. We were very well integrated into the wider community in Belfast.
“At that time I don’t remember an awful lot of anti-Semitism in the Seventies and early Eighties. The Troubles were raging during those years. But in my role in the last number of years, representing the Jewish community we have sadly seen an increase of anti-Semitism. Our cemetery off the Falls Road was desecrated a couple of years ago. The windows of the synagogue have been attacked on a number of occasions and indeed there was a video of an Israeli journalist who went into a pub in Derry and someone said that Hitler didn’t kill enough Jews. It shows that this history of ant-Jewish sentiment is present in Northern Ireland.
“We have a far right, neo-Nazi element. And we have on the left an anti-Israel, pro-Palestine current there which is viciously anti-Semitic.”