Waking up cozily in Europe’s most bombed hotel, we each embarked in different directions on this rainy Belfast morning, where we had two hours to report stories independently. Despite our different agendas, we were all excited to welcome our second professor, Niall O’Dowd, to the trip, after he arrived on a turbulent flight from New York yesterday.
After breakfast, Laura Insensee and Deborah Lee-Hjelle explored a section of Belfast called “the village,” where they interviewed some migrant workers, including an Albanian Muslim family. Meanwhile, Robbie Corey-Boulet visited an Anglican church that had initiated talks with a neighboring mosque in the aftermath of post-9/11 hate crimes. Debra Katz and Andrew Nusca wandered around the city taking pictures of historical graffiti and murals, while other students reported from their hotel rooms.
At 11:30 a.m., the nine students who had returned from reporting boarded the bus for a short drive to the Shankill Methodist Church in West Belfast. As we got off the bus, the Reverend Jim Rea greeted the group rather skeptically and ushered us into the church. Inside was a no-frills, high-ceiling sanctuary, with a simple gold cross balanced on the altar and the words “This Do In Remembrance of Me” etched in the wood below. Rea brusquely introduced himself and opened the floor for questioning, with a blatant distrust of the Americans congregated before him.
“An awful lot of people died in this area,” Rea said. “There is a peace line that divides the community.” Today, although tensions have quieted and violence has mostly subsided, the Shankill neighborhood still experiences what Rea calls “recreational rioting.” Such smalls crimes and stone throwing incidents may occur during more uproarious events like community marches. But the leading parties like Sinn Fein support the police and want to rid the streets of such violence. “The big political players don’t want things to happen that will unhinge the political process,” Rea said.
Within Shankill’s dwindling population, Rea sees a dramatic increase in secularization, as people move away from both religion and the neighborhood. Three local Methodist churches have combined their congregations in one.
Aboard the bus for a tour of the neighborhood, Rea seemed to warm up slightly to us, and he guided us to the peace line, a 20-mile blockade that separates the Catholic and Protestant neighborhoods of Belfast. Built only five years ago, the peace wall was erected in order to prevent violence from seeping through. Varying slightly in height and girth from section to section, the wall was mostly beige cinderblocks, with curls of thorny barbed wire decorated the top. Graffitti scrawls and giant murals covered the sides, alternating from Nationalist to Loyalist themes. Of particular interest to many students on the bus were the pro-Palestinian murals in a Nationalist section, with images of Israeli soldiers and Arabic slogans.
After about 45 minutes of weaving the ponderous bus through the nooks and crannies of West Belfest, we dropped the reverend back at his church. Everyone breathed a bit easier, as he left the vehicle and a brewing tension subsided.
“I thought I was in a bad mood today,” Professor Goldman said, referring to Rea’s icy attitude towards us.
Professor O’Dowd didn’t quite agree with Goldman’s assessment. “I thought he was actually quite gracious,” he said. “Just remember where this guy was…this is a traumatized community.”
The bus rolled to a stop outside of the Sinn Fein headquarters, where we were a half hour early for our 1 p.m. meeting with Gerry Adams, the leader of the Sinn Fein party. Unsure what to do with our spare time, we huddled inside the shelter of a uniquely perfumed bar, which shared much in common with the New York City subways.
“It smells like a urinal,” Andrew Nusca said.
Urinal or not, students and professors sat down at a wooden table to drink some water and tea.
“Only a Jewish guy from New York would go into an Irish bar and order tea,” O’Dowd said, chuckling at Goldman’s beverage choice.
O’Dowd prepared us for our ensuing visit with the politician, acquainting us with Adams’ background and contributions to the peace processes. Describing him as a defining figure in Irish nationalism, O’Dowd discussed how despite all odds, Adams was able to hold the movement together with Martin McGuiness, current deputy minister of the new power-sharing government. After years of imprisonment, Adams didn’t even see his son till the boy turned four years old.
“Can he take it to the next stage?” O’Dowd questioned. “I don’t think he can.” He explained that Northern Ireland will probably need a younger successor to follow Adams and McGinnis in bridging the gap towards peace, someone who has less baggage and is unassociated with violence of years past.
At 1 p.m., we shuffled down the street to the Sinn Fein building, where we joined the rest of the students who had been out reporting. In true J-School style, nine cameras, one video camera and four voice recorders rested on the table, waiting for Adams’ arrival. After waiting about five minutes in anticipation, the door opened – but Zach Goelman walked through the door rather than Gerry Adams. Both Emma and Adam Goldman followed in suit, armed with a collection of shopping bags. Emma accidentally claimed head of the table, until her father dissuaded her from supplanting the Sinn Fein leader.
After 15 more minutes, Adams entered the room, in a peppery gray beard and a casual blue button-down shirt with a yellow tie.
“The conflict in Ireland is not a religious conflict,” Adams said. “Religion doesn’t matter, shouldn’t matter.” He acknowledges that there has been a longstanding cleavage between Catholicism and Protestantism but feels that the divide was never about theology.
As far as his personal beliefs, Adams disapproves of certain elements of Catholicism, particularly bothered by the fact that women cannot be ordained as priests. He finds the Methodists to be the most progressive Christians – the group who first began talking to Sinn Fein.
“I’m sort of an a la carte Catholic-Buddhist,” Adams said.
When asked about the endurance of the Good Friday agreement, Adams stressed the continued importance of diplomatic negotiations instead of weaponry. “You needed to have an alternative – to pursue republican objectives through unarmed conflict.”
Crucial to the onset of these agreements was the United States, Adams confirmed, citing our own Niall O’Dowd as one of the critical liaisons between the Northern Irish opponents and Bill Clinton. Today, Adams commends the dual government, shared by unionist Ian Paisley and nationalist Mark McGinnis, whom he calls “Siamese twins.” As Paisley transitions out of the first minister position this spring, Adams foresees a possible resurgence of turbulence.
“Unionism has to adjust to be without this iconic figure,” he said. Meanwhile, he stressed that Nationalists have to treat Unionists as well as possible, ensuring them equality should Ireland ever fully unite.
“If you don’t talk to people, if you don’t listen to people, there can’t be progress,” Adams said. “How do you make peace with someone who killed your brother?”
At the end of our private session with Adams, we followed him outside of the Sinn Fein headquarters, where he was conducting a “doorstop” open meeting with members of the Belfast media. After finishing up television interview, Adams himself requested a group photo with our entire class. Luckily, his assistant was dramatically more skilled in photography than was Desmond, yesterday’s host at the Buddhist monastery.
After lunch and a second bus tour of the city, the group gathered in the hotel restaurant for a buffet-style dinner. At 7 p.m., we left for the Orthodox Hebrew Congregation, to celebrate the Jewish festival of Purim.
Capped in a golden speckled party hat, Rabbi Menachem Brackman, 26, led Purim services, wrapped in a long black coat and sporting a characteristically Hasidic beard. Brackman and his wife Ruth, 22, moved with their six-month-old son to Belfast only five and a half weeks ago, to take over the vacated rabbinical position. Part of the Chabad-Lubavitch movement, the young couple are beginning a six-month trial period as a team in Belfast, before deciding whether or not they would like to be official Chabad shluchim (emissaries). Although the Jewish community has been a fixture in Belfast for the past 150 years, the congregation has fallen to 108 members, with sparse access to kosher foods and Jewish life.
Yet both Menachem and Ruth Brackman were pleased with the evening’s turnout, a gathering of nearly 50 congregants. Among the participants this evening were longtime residents, recent migrants from Israel and our class of course. Rabbi Brackman whizzed through the Megillah reading at turbo speed, pausing occasionally to catch his breath. Jews and non-Jews alike clanked their noisemakers and banged on the glossy wooden pews, every time he voiced Haman’s name.
“I enjoyed it,” said John Byrne, our tour guide, who had never been to a Jewish service before. “It surprised me that it wasn’t a bit more reverential.”
After the service, congregants and visitors gathered together in the lobby and hall attached to the sanctuary, where they shared hamantashen, coffee and conversation. Brackman made his rounds dispensing shots of Scotch whiskey and quietly disappeared to reemerge as a full-feathered yellow chicken, to conduct a costume contest.
“I really enjoyed the costume,” Robbie Corey-Boulet said. “I thought the giant chicken was robbed – but he was the rabbi.”
The few children attending the service flocked around the rabbi in their elaborate costumes, which most notably featured Spiderman and a giant banana. Despite these scattered young faces, the average age in the synagogue is over 75 years old, according to Edwin Coppel, 64, the chairman of the congregation. The community itself has been in Belfast since approximately 1850, with the first synagogue opening officially in 1904 and the second in 1964. Coppel has been a member of the community for his entire life and laments its continual decrease in population.
“Unless we get the message out, we don’t get the support from our community,” he said. “It’s really a question of being more cohesive in our efforts.”
However, the congregation faces difficulties bringing the community together because potential members cannot attend services very regularly, unless they were to drive to the synagogue.
“We live in Northern Ireland and come to all the festivals,” said Moira Jackson, who met her husband in Israel in 1980, where they both converted to Judaism. The Jacksons are not yet full-fledged members, in part because they cannot walk 12 miles from home to synagogue on Shabbat.
Northern Irish Jews find sanctuary in a community where for once they aren’t a minority and can enjoy common traditions of generations past. Although they find very few Jewish people walking the streets of Belfast, they rarely face anti-Semitism and find that the majority population is very accepting of their culture.
“The Protestants and the Catholics were too concerned with each other to bother with the Jewish people – we were left pretty well alone,” Coppel said. But since the end of the troubles, the congregation has become involved in interfaith dialogues and even hosts council meetings between Jews and Christians. “If people can see you, at least they know you’re not walking around with horns,” he said.
