The October 7th massacre in Israel has unleashed “all sorts of dark forces” against Irish Jews, a prominent member of the community has warned.
In the two and a half years since then, Jews across the world have raised concerns about a wave of hatred and anti-semitism levied against them.
The Jewish Representative Council of Ireland began documenting anti-semtic incidents and 143 were reported to them between July 2025 and January 2026.
On Moncrieff, Oliver Sears of Holocaust Awareness Ireland said nearly one quarter of the incidents, 24%, had been reported to the Gardaí.
“The most common forms were verbal abuse or slurs, a lot of vandalism or graffiti, threats and intimidation, exclusion and discrimination,” he explained.
“Then what we call direct digital targeting; so, that's not social media - because there was simply too much of that activity to have resources to record that.
“We're talking about individual emails sent to individual Irish Jews that were extremely vicious or threatening.”
Despite the seriousness of many of the incidents, Mr Sears added that many Jews feel that their concerns have been “dismissed or degraded, underplayed” by wider Irish society.
It all means that many are reluctant to speak out when they suffer abuse.
“There would certainly be a lack of confidence in people sort of wanting to speak up about it and making themselves more visible,” he said.
“But I think it's also true that in a lot of cases where people are abused, there is huge underreporting.”
Although neutrality during the Second World War meant the Irish Jewish community was spared the full horrors of the Holocaust, Ireland has never been immune to antisemitism.
In 1904, a priest in Limerick told locals that their Jewish neighbours had “come to our land to fasten themselves on us like leeches and to draw our blood”. He organised a boycott of their businesses and most then fled the Treaty City.
Still, most Jews in Ireland believe the Republic has been good to them as a minority community.
“For a lot of Irish Jews, this is the last couple of years, it's the very first time they've experienced anti-Semitism,” Mr Sears said, adding that before October 7th, anti-semtism was simply “under the surface”.
“Conor Cruise O'Brien described anti-Semitism famously as a light sleeper - so, it doesn't take much for it to come to the surface,” he continued.
“It's there, it's just that there are obvious triggers and October the 7th has unleashed all sorts of dark forces, unfortunately.”
There are an estimated 2,200 Jews in Ireland, with an even smaller population living in Belfast.
Main image: A Jewish man wearing Yarmulke with the Star of David. Picture by: Alamy.com.
