A report on anti-Semitism in the State will detail “over 100 incidents of hatred against Jewish people in Ireland”, reported our four months of 2025, Chief Rabbi Yoni Wieder has said.
A comprehensive report on specific anti-Semitic incidents is being compiled by the Jewish Representative Council of Ireland, with publication expected in the new year.
“The general trend is clear,” he said: “anti-Semitic graffiti has become increasingly common, including graffiti explicitly calling to `Kill Jews’.”
He recalled incidents such as a Jewish child in Dublin being “chased around a playground by kids shouting `free Palestine’”, along with incidents in workplaces, “while online anti-Semitism from Irish users was particularly vicious, cruel, and completely out of control”.
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He acknowledged that “anti-Semitism is not the experience of every Jewish person in Ireland ” and added that “incidents to date have been non-physical, and we are happy about that”.
“But the effects are very real,” he said. “particularly following attacks [on Jewish people] in New York, the killing of two Jewish people at a synagogue in Manchester last October, and now Sydney. Maybe it will not stay like that and no one can guarantee things will not turn violent here too”.
According to the council’s chair Maurice Cohen, the main concern in Ireland’s Jewish community today is “ambient anti-Semitism” which some fear could lead to atrocities in this State such as the Bondi Beach massacre in Australia at the weekend.
Mr Cohen said that “so many feel that anti-Semitism ended at World War II and, if synagogues are not burning or Jews are not being rounded up, then there is no anti-Semitism.”
“It was the same in the 1920s, but no one was listening. Anti-Semitism morphs. The state of Israel is not perfect and criticism is valid in many cases – its biggest critics are Jews themselves – but ramped-up criticism in parliaments around the world leads to such as Bondi Beach,” he said.
The council’s report next year will include details of a US Jewish family who had been living in Killorglin, Co Kerry, for five years but “felt driven out as soon as people realised they were Jewish”. “They returned to the US about three months ago,” he said.
Some Jewish women had bad experiences in Irish hospitals, with one such woman being refused treatment by a Jordanian doctor while another, awaiting a C-section, was left by her doctor and then treated by another who berated her about Israel, he said.
“No incident is trivial,” he said, with Irish Jews “being aligned with babykillers” in some cases.
Chief Rabbi Wieder did not doubt the sincerity of those who protest at the appalling suffering in Gaza or on how to prosecute a just war. “But political commentary in Ireland has been extremely one-sided and often anti-Israeli criticism has spilled over into anti-Semitism,” he said.
The distinction [between criticism of Israel and anti-Semitism] doesn’t always hold where effects on Ireland’s Jewish community is concerned, he argues.
[ Bondi Beach shooting: Australia vows stricter gun laws after 15 killedOpens in new window ]
Even if not intended, it created “an environment that emboldens those who seek to intimidate and target Jewish people in Ireland,” he said. It was his belief “that only a very small minority in this country wish to marginalise or threaten Jewish people. But even this small number is having a very real and damaging impact.”
The grief felt by Ireland’s Jewish community the massacre at Bondi Beach was “very raw and deep”, but the Jewish people “have been through a lot worse before and we will get through this as well”.
Hanukkah celebrations would go ahead as normal in Ireland this year, he added. “It’s about the celebration of light and we try to bring light when the world get’s darker.”
