Who was Chaim Herzog and why is a park in Dublin named after him?
Chaim Herzog was Israel’s president from 1983 to 1993. Born in Belfast in 1918, Herzog spent his childhood in Dublin when his father Issac Herzog was chief rabbi of Ireland.
He celebrated his bar mitzvah in Adelaide Road synagogue and was educated at Wesley College in Dublin.
The family lived on the South Circular Road in Portobello, a historically Jewish area. His father, the chief rabbi of Ireland, was a fluent Irish speaker who became known as “the Sinn Féin rabbi”, as he supported Irish independence.
Sent by his parents in 1935 to attend a Talmudic academy in Jerusalem, he joined the Haganah, a Zionist paramilitary organisation. He enlisted in the British army and was posted to Normandy in 1944 as an intelligence officer.
READ MORE
Speaking in 2023, his son, current Israeli president Isaac Herzog, said: “I will never forget how he (Chaim Herzog) described to me the horrors that unfolded before his eyes as one of the first liberators of the death camps, including Bergen-Belsen. The human skeletons in the striped pyjamas, the hell on earth, the stench, the heart of darkness.”
After the German surrender during World War II, Chaim Herzog was assigned to identify and interrogate top Nazi officials, according to his biographer Lawrence William White. He returned to Palestine and headed a Haganah department that spied on the United Nations.
During his tenure as Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations between 1975 and 1978, he opposed the 1975 UN resolution describing Zionism as a form of racism.
In a speech to UN delegates on November 10th 1975, Herzog famously tore up the resolution at the podium.
He said: “Zionism is nothing more and nothing less than the Jewish people’s sense of origin and destination in the land linked eternally with its name.”
In 1987, he became the first Israeli head of state to visit Germany.
Herzog Park was named in his honour in 1995, recognising the former Israeli president’s local roots. He died in Tel Aviv, Israel, in 1997.
Where is Herzog Park?
Herzog Park is located in Rathgar, in an area that has long been at the centre of Jewish life in Dublin. It is close to the only Jewish school in the country, Stratford College.
The coeducational fee-paying school was founded in 1954 and stands on the junction of Zion Road and Orwell Road.
Is anything else in Dublin named after the Herzogs?
As the only higher-level institution teaching Jewish Studies in Ireland, Trinity College Dublin established the Herzog Centre in honour of Issac Herzog’s legacy. The centre was founded to facilitate the engagement of students and the Irish public with Jewish and Near Eastern history and culture through academic programmes, public lectures and cultural events.
The Jewish Representative Council of Ireland is based in Herzog House, located beside the park and school in Rathgar.
Are the family politically involved today?
The Herzog dynasty remains strong in Israel, with two of Chaim Herzog’s sons having served in prominent political positions. Yitzhak Herzog is the current president of Israel, while older son Michael recently ended his term as Israeli ambassador to the US.
Who suggested the park should be denamed?
A recommendation by Dublin City Council’s cross-party commemorations committee to remove the Herzog name from the park.
On Monday night, a council meeting heard that councillors could not have removed the name from the park because of a Ministerial delay in providing regulations for the process.
The name debate began last June, when a motion was submitted by Sinn Féin councillor Kourtney Kenny to rename the park Hind Rajab Park to commemorate a five-year-old Palestinian girl who was killed by Israeli forces on January 29th, 2024, along with six of her relatives.
Last December councillors agreed the issue should be referred to the council’s commemorations committee, who decided a consultation process should be undertaken to determine an appropriate new name.
[ Chief Rabbi: Move to erase Chaim Herzog’s name and history is cruel hammer blowOpens in new window ]
What is the argument for denaming?
Herzog’s involvement with the Jewish paramilitary group Haganah and work for the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) during the Nakba – the mass displacement of Palestinians during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war – form the basis of the argument.
Herzog joined Haganah in 1936, an underground military organisation from 1920-1948 which later became the army of the state of Israel.
In 1948, Chaim Herzog worked for the IDF in the Arab-Israeli war in an integral intelligence capacity. From there, he rose through the IDF’s military ranks until his retirement from active duty in 1962.
He was later appointed military governor of the West Bank upon its capture by Israel in 1967.
What has the response to the renaming proposal been?
There has been strong backlash against the proposal from members of Ireland’s Jewish community and Government.
Chief Rabbi Yoni Wieder said removing the name “Herzog” from the park would be a shameful erasure of Irish–Jewish history. Former minister for justice, Alan Shatter, weighed in labelling Dublin City Council “full-on Nazi” over the proposal.
Taoiseach Micheál Martin said on Sunday that the proposal to rename Herzog Park “should be withdrawn in its entirety and not proceeded with”, while Tánaiste Simon Harris described it as “wrong” and “offensive”.
