As soon as I heard the name of Great Britain’s newly named chief rabbi, I knew it sounded familiar. I met Ephraim Mirvis back in 1986, when I was a foreign correspondent for the Philadelphia Inquirer based in London, and he was the relatively new chief rabbi of Ireland.
I was young for my job. So was he.
We met when I interviewed him for a story about the remaining Jews of Ireland, prompted by the closing of one of Dublin’s three synagogues and the opening of a tiny museum about Ireland’s Jews. It seemed a perfect metaphor for what was happening to this small but determined community: its young were leaving, as Ireland’s young do, and the elders were struggling to do more than live out their own history.
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