IN A taxi journey in 2008 from Cork airport into the city, New Zealand artist Maddie Leach asked the driver what was the name of an area they were in.
“That’s Jew town,” he told her, and her interest was piqued.
The name refers to lanes of small red brick houses near Albert Road, on the south side of Cork city, where upwards of 60 Jewish families settled during the 19th century. Of these only three or so remain, and the Jewish community in Cork is now struggling to hold on to and maintain its property and religious buildings.
Leach, an internationally recognised artist, has returned to Cork this week and created a work of art, entitled Evening Echo, at Shalom Park in the city, to mark the Jewish community’s presence in Cork. The project, overseen by the National Sculpture Factory and Cork City Council and supported by Bord Gáis, who initially gifted Shalom Park to Cork, will involve a complex lighting system to happen on the final day of the Jewish festival of Hanukkah today.
It will then occur every year for the next 50 years and involves nine lamps in the park. Each year, on the final day of Hanukkah, the taller lamp will light for a number of minutes and begin a sequence for all the other lights to light up.
Leach says of the work: “The Jewish community in Cork as it stands now is on the cusp of disappearance, and that was what I was interested in. It is very sad talking to the remaining members, and they are worrying about who will cut the grass in the cemetery, and how to maintain the synagogue. Many communities rise and fall in a place, and the disappearance of one often coincides with the rise of another. I think this work resists that sense of disappearance because of its return each year.”
Fred Rosehill, one of the few remaining members of the Jewish community in Cork and chairman of the board of trustees of the Cork Hebrew Congregation, said the work is a subtle interaction with a long established Jewish ceremony.
The project takes place at sunset today from 4.17-4.25pm at Shalom Park, Cork.
