 Hello friends and subscribers, welcome back to my YouTube channel, my name is Daniel Roso. I wanted to share today a little bit about what I was like to grow up as a Jew in Ireland and how that has affected my personal sense of identity. This is something that a lot of Israelis are curious about so I thought I'd share a few very frank words especially at this extremely important time. I was born in Ireland's capital city of Dublin in 1989 and until I moved to Israel in 2015 I lived in Ireland for the majority of my adult life. Although I was born in Dublin, I live for most of my time in Ireland in Cork. For those not familiar with Ireland, Cork is the second largest city in the country and is located in the south. The Jewish population in Ireland is and always has been remarkably small. According to the latest statistics from 2023, there are only about 2700 Jews living in the entire country, which of course is less than 3000 in total. It's important to note that these numbers are for the Republic of Ireland and do not include Northern Ireland, which is formally part of the UK. Most Jews in the Republic of Ireland live in Dublin, where there is some basic Jewish infrastructure such as a synagogue, kosher food and a Jewish school. Cork also had a synagogue until 2016 when it closed due to a lack of congregate numbers. My late grandfather Fred Roso managed that synagogue until its closure. My family arrived in Ireland from Lithuania in the 19th century. My late great grandfather was the immigrant in this picture. It's weird to sometimes think that only a couple of hundred years after this point I'm repeating the immigrant experience, but this time in Israel. While my descendants chose to move to Ireland I'm really not sure. There is a legend that they got off a boat in Cork because they thought it sounded like New York and they apparently didn't speak a word of English. Whether that's true or just apocryphal, I'm not really sure. Growing up Jewish in Cork was a pretty strange experience. I didn't have a single Jewish friend and in the school I went to with more than 600 students I was the only Jewish pupil. Religious services in the Cork synagogue were mostly held on the hakeem and for a while on one Shabbat every month. Achieving a Minyan, a Jewish quorum of prayer of 10 adult men was extremely difficult and was a constant problem. Overall however I liked growing up in Ireland. That was really until I visited Israel for the first time at about the age of 16 and began increasingly connecting with the idea of Zionism. From that point on I would say that I found living in Ireland as a Jew increasingly uncomfortable. Many Irish Jews have long maintained that there is no anti-Semitism in Ireland. I'm here to tell you that I think that's a complete mistruth. My family and me received anonymous threatening hate phone calls and hate comments on social media websites. An English teacher in school used to go on rants about how the Jews stole the land for the Palestinians and this was because Jews are greedy people. So even if it wasn't in your face all of the time I believe that anti-Semitism definitely exists in Irish society. After my trip to Israel I became more religiously observant and started to keep the laws of kosher and attempted to keep Shabbat. But in Cork keeping Shabbat meant being by yourself for 24 hours which really wasn't a lot of fun. Also if I wanted to marry Jewish there were basically no options so I began experimenting with different places to live. I lived in London for a year but strangely I found the idea of living in a specific Jewish part of town to also be a kind of not exactly what I wanted experience. I didn't like living without a Jewish community in my life and I didn't like living in a Jewish community in the diaspora. The only idea that really appealed to me was living in a country where being Jewish and being an ordinary member of society weren't conflicting principles and there was only one country that could meet that criteria that's the state of Israel. In 2015 I moved to Jerusalem. I moved by myself and to this state I don't really have any family here so I worked on starting my own one. For many people who move to Israel from all around the world this is just how life is. Moving to Israel which is called Aliyah in Hebrew has been difficult and it still is quite difficult although I haven't regretted it for a single minute. Certainly not now when Israeli society is working so hard to come together and put us differences aside. For one there is a difficulty involved in learning Hebrew which is a pretty tough language. There is the difficulty of finding a good job without an established network and sometimes also the sense of shame I have that my Hebrew isn't better and also because I didn't serve in the army. All these things sometimes come at me all at once. But more than that being an Irish born Jew means living with a very complex identity that relatively few people in the world share. The hostility from Ireland towards Israel never ceases to take me aback both in its relentlessness and in its vitriol. Many Israelis I meet are interested to learn a lot of things about Ireland. Personally I find it impossible to identify with a country that seems to only have hatred and criticism towards the country that I've come to live in and love which is Israel. In fact I'd go so far as to say that if I didn't still have some family living in Ireland I probably would refuse to visit the country on principle. Many Israelis have come to regard Ireland as something of an enemy state. Ireland's reputation as the most anti-Israel country in Europe is in my opinion an entirely justified one. I find it flabbergasting that many people in Ireland seem to be surprised by the fact that Israel has recognised the extent their opposition to Israel. From my perspective it's simply calling it facts as they are. In my time living in Israel I have met very few Irish Jews which is a reflection of the fact that firstly there are so few of them and also not enough a lot of them have moved to Israel. Especially those under the age of 70. Population is really extremely small. The most important mission of my life as I see it will be having children who don't have this conflicting ethnic identity. Who don't know the loneliness and isolation of growing up as the only Jew in school and who don't have to go through growing up living in a country that seems really opposed to a core part of their identity which may be Zionism. I know that growing up in Israel like any country has its own challenges but not having to go through these things is a major benefit that I think that lots of Israelis frankly don't appreciate enough. That's all for today. Please subscribe if you'd like to receive more videos.