Come Here To Me!

Today is Holocaust Memorial Day. With that in mind, I dipped into an old Come Here To Me article which was the popular review we carried out of the Jewish Museum in Portobello.

A small, touching plaque features upstairs in the restored synagogue to Ettie Steinberg. Herself and her son were to become the only Irish citizens to perish in the Holocaust. Ettie was raised in Raymond Terrace. The horrific figure of six million can be difficult to comprehend, but when the story of one individual is brought to life, not least a Dubliner born only a short walk from the Museum, the horror of those years becomes clearer.

Ettie’s family were oiginally from Czechoslovakia, and had come to Ireland from London in 1926. She married a Belgian man in 1937, and moved to Belgium with him before going on to Paris two years later. In 1942, Ettie and her young son, born in Paris, were transported to Auschwitz by the Nazis. In his wonderful work Jews In Twentieth-Century Ireland , Dermot Keough wrote that:

By a strange irony, the Steinberg’s in Dublin had secured visas for Ettie and her family through the British Home Office in Belfast. The visas were sent immediately to Toulouse but they arrived too late. Ettie and her family had been rounded up the day before and sent to the camp at Drancy, outside Paris. They were transported to Auschwitz and to their immediate death.

The map below shows that area that once made up ‘Dublin’s Little Jerusalem’, and was first uploaded to Come Here To Me by jaycarax here, at the time of a fascinating documentary on the murders of two Jewish men in the area in the early 1920s.