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Irish Americans:  Home for the Heart - May 2 – July 31, 2001

They crossed the Atlantic to flee starvation and religious persecution.  What they found when they got to this country was more heartbreak.  “Help Wanted” read the signs.  “No Irish need apply”.

The struggles of the Irish immigrants were documented in a traveling exhibit from the Irish-American Heritage Museum in Albany, N.Y.

Included in the exhibit was information about the British occupation of Ireland, the persecution of the Roman Catholic Church, the potato famine, and the experiences  immigrants in the United States with discrimination.

There were many parallels with the Jewish American immigrant experience.  Like the Hebrews in Ancient Israel who were forced by the Syrian Greek government to hide in caves in order to pray or teach religion to their children, Irish Catholics created the Ancient Order of Hibernians to secretly teach the catechism to their children during the British occupation.  Like Jews, Irish fled to America to find a better life for themselves. 

There were also differences between the two experiences.  In Irish families, the first member to emigrate was often a single woman who could find work as a domestic and eventually save enough money to bring other family members over.  Jewish men in Czarist Russia were conscripted for military service and taken far into the interior of Russia in order to be “Russified”.  They were punished and sometimes tortured for practicing their religion, speaking Yiddish, or refusing to eat non-kosher food.  Thus the first Jews to flee to America were generally men. 

Part of the mission of Hatikvah Holocaust Education Center is to teach about prejudice.  This exhibit showed how another group suffered from discrimination.

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