Prepared from material provided by Rabbi Dr. A.
Carlebach, J.G. Fox, and H. Meek,
and originally printed in the Belfast Jewish Record
The organised
Belfast Hebrew Congregation was
founded in 1869, but the first regular service seems to have taken place in
1864, and there were certainly Jews in Belfast and Northern Ireland at various
dates in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. There were, for example,
Jewish tradesmen in Belfast during the eighteenth century, these including such
men as Israel Woolf who was reported in the Ulster Miscellany for January 1754
as having 'set up trade in this town. He is a vendor of gold and silver plate
and ornaments and picture frames in gold and pure gilt on plaster.' There is
also in the Donegall Estate Papers a reference to a 'Jew Butcher' in 1771, but
no further details are known of any community until 1845 when Reverend Morris J.
Raphall of Birmingham came to lecture on the Bible; 'he was countenanced by the
intelligent inhabitants but a rabble gathered at the place and with drums,
noises and riots prevented the lecture proceeding.' By 1861 there were 52 Jews
in Ulster, most of them in Belfast. Many of them, were originally, from Germany.
and had come to Northern Ireland as a result of the growth and development of
the linen trade. Prominent among these were Jacob Mautner and Daniel Joseph
Jaffé. Jaffé, born in Mecklenburg in North Germany, had apparently been a
frequent visitor to Belfast to purchase linen goods before deciding to
settle there and in partnership with his brother Isaac (of Hamburg) to set up an
export house and expand the trade. Of his nine sons and daughters, several took
a prominent part in public life, especially Martin and Otto, later Lord Mayor of
Belfast. It was in Martin's house in Holywood Co. Down that the first service
was held in 1864. In 1869 an advertisement was published in a German-Jewish
newspaper calling for 'a minister of the non-orthodox culte', and in 1871 there
was laid the foundation stone of the Great Victoria Street Synagogue. The cost
of the synagogue was largely defrayed by Daniel Jaffé who died in 1874 shortly
after the synagogue's consecration.
The first minister of the congregation was Dr. Joseph Chotzner,
born in Cracow and a graduate of the University and Jewish Theological Seminary
of Breslau. By 1879 the congregation had so far grown that it boasted of regular
services, a choir, and 'a philanthropic society for granting loans'. Chotzner
left Belfast in 1880 to go to Harrow where he ran a house for Jewish boys there;
he returned to Belfast in 1893, and in the years between the congregation was
served by one or two officials who acted as Chazanim and teachers. The lay
leadership passed to Otto Jaffé who had been born in Hamburg in 1846, came to
Belfast in 1858, and had gone to the U.S.A. in 1865. Jaffé returned to Belfast
in 1877 and launched himself into a career that was at once business, civic, and
charitable. Reputedly 'shrewd, sharp-witted, far-seeing and almost parsimonious
in business, ...0 lavish in unostentatious charities', he was elected a city
councillor in 1894, and was the first Lord Mayor of Belfast in 1899. A year
later he was knighted and continued to participate fully in the public and
educational life of the City and province. He was also Life-President of the
Belfast congregation and presided over the remarkable growth of the whole
community.
There is little available on the life of the congregation
between 1880 and 1897 when there were about 40 paying members paying
contributions varying between one and two shillings per week. The balance sheets
where they survive reveal an income rising from £82.10.0. for the ten months of
1891-92 to £210.12.3d. for 1893-94; the expenditure was just below that. Dr.
Chotzner's salary in 1893 was £13 per quarter and the Chazan, Reverend
Mayrowitz, was paid £1.7.6d. per week. The congregation had set up a School
Board and members of the Board supervised the work of the teachers; examinations
were held, on every Rosh. Chodesh. 'In 1892 the congregation acquired additional
premises in which there was installed a mikveh, and in 1897 yet another house was bought to serve as a school-building. This, the Hebrew National
(State) School, provided both secular and religious education. In 1898 there
were 113 pupils on the roll.
This great increase in numbers - in 1890 there were already 60 families and
in 1900 one hundred - was the result of the influx of largely East European
Jews, whose relations with the German-Jewish 'host' community were not always
harmonious. There is ample evidence of the distaste felt on both sides; the
Russian-Jewish immigrants felt little or no respect for the Anglicised leaders
of the congregation, while they for their part were out of sympathy with the
manners, the business ethics, and the religious outlook of the newcomers. Even
Dr. Chotzner was to be found on various occasions criticising the newer
immigrants and their bigotry in petty religious matters. In the meantime Otto
Jaffé a continued to preside over the congregation,
doubling at times as Treasurer, although he did not often actually attend the
Committee meetings. Decisions taken at meetings were usually referred to him for
confirmation, while at times he was represented by his non-Jewish secretary who
acted as an umpire at turbulent discussions and elections. A growing deficit
worried him, as did the apparent reluctance of the synagogue members to shoulder
a greater share of the burden. In one letter, of April 1899, he complained that
the synagogue used more gas than he, his stables, and his servants. The
differences between the 'magnates' and the newer members were eventually
reflected in the decision to set up a new independent synagogue, largely
composed of the more recent arrivals from Lithuania and Poland and led by a
series of 'foreign' Rabbanim. However, the need for continued co-operation over
such issues as education and the supply of kosher meat led the two congregations
to reconsider the possibilities of amalgamation and in 1903 the new united body
was established, followed in 1904 by the building of a new synagogue and in 1907
by the opening of a new school paid for by Sir Otto Jaffé for the use,
though not exclusive use, of the Hebrew Congregation.
At no time in these years was the congregation able to pay
its way financially, and over and over again it was able to meet its liabilities
only through the generosity of its President. He had not only to pay the bulk of
the four thousand pounds for the now synagogue but even for the dinner given in
his honour to celebrate the opening of the Jaffé school. None the less, if the
vitality of the community can be measured by the degree of argument revealed in
the synagogue minute books, Belfast was certainly very lively. Much smaller than
Dublin, it is at the same time on interesting example of a small community
managing to steer an independent existence between two warring sets of political
and religious interests.
SOURCES: See also Louis Hyman,
The Jews of Ireland (Shannon, 1972)
