The Kosher Side Of Dublin

Portobello, A Quickly Gentrifying Area, Was Once The City's Jewish Heart.

- Vritti Bansal

Considering Ireland’s intrinsic culture relationship with the fictitious, it’s worth mentioning that James Joyce’s Leopold Bloom was born in Portobello. Besides being the childhood home of the protagonist of Ulysses—and the heart of Dublin’s early Jewish settlement—the area is now a neighbourhood undergoing rapid gentrification.

The houses on Portobello’s winding streets date back to the early 1880s, mainly built as affordable living quarters for the middle class. The area was about 50 per cent Jewish then. When Jewish refugees fleeing pogroms in Eastern Europe arrived, members of the community got together and bought the vacant houses, which they rented out to refugees.

Today, luas (tram) tracks run through its serpentine streets, a street food market holds its own among restaurants and coffee shops, a pub named after a Nobel Prize winning playwright serves up drinks to thirsty locals, and an old bakery caters to kosher-specific needs.

The Bretzel Bakery is still the best-known bakery for kosher bread in Dublin. Started in 1870, Bretzel is known for its bagels and challah, fresh loaves of which fly offthe shelves on a Friday quicker than patrons can say cream-cheese-bagel. “We even supply our challah to the SuperValu store in Churchtown,” Ines Silva, a member of the staff, tells me. After a quick phone call with the head office to make sure they are indeed the only bakery in Dublin to prepare challah as per the traditional recipe, Silva explains how lots of Jews walk in to buy their kosher bread before Shabbat every week.