Jewish people appreciate memorial to Holocaust
June 1995
IRELAND’S Jewish Community greatly appreciates the erection of the first memorial to the Holocaust in Listowel, Minister for Equality and Law Reform Mervyn Taylor said when he opened the Garden of Europe in the town at the weekend.
“Speaking as a member of Ireland’s Jewish Community I can only say how much this gesture by the people of Listowel is appreciated by my own community,” he said.
“It is, as far as I know the only public Holocaust memorial in Ireland and perhaps typically it took the people of Kerry, renowned for their compassion, as well as their initiative to erect the first one,” he said.
On Saturday several hundred people braved the wind and rain and walked from the Listowel Arms Hotel to the new Garden of Europe which has been developed by Listowel Rotary Club at a cost of over £120,000 in what was once Listowel’s Town Dump.
They were led by lone piper Seamus Hunt on the trek to the garden where over 2,500 tress and shrubs have been planted on the 3l /z acre site adjacent to Listowel’s Town park on the banks of the river Feale.
The creation of this garden is more evidence, if such were needed, of ithe ingenuity/ and creativity of the people of Listowel.
“I have no doubt whatsoever that this creative achievement will be acknowledged by people from the town, from all over Kerry and beyond, visiting the garden for many years to come,” he said.
Listowel Rotarian Paddy Fitzgibbon, whose brainchild the garden was, spoke eloquently of the Holocaust.
“In recent years the Holocaust has perhaps become the ultimate symbol of suffering and criminality and is now part of the commonplace imagery of Western man and so perhaps one could say that it is only right that Listowel too should contribute to this iconology,” said Mr Fitzgibbon.
He told the assembly that this generation and one or two after this will be the last that will be able to say we met and shook the hands of some of those who survived the Holocaust.
He welcomed one survivor Susie Diamond who travelled to Listowel for the opening of the garden.
“Go home and tell your children and your grandchildren that today you looked into eyes that witnessed the most cataclysmic events ever unleashed by mankind upon mankind,” he said.