What’s in a name? Plenty, according to the Cork Jewish Community.

Members of the small Irish congregation have voted to change its title from Munster Jewish Community in a bid to make it “more visible” to Jews moving to the area. However, the new name does cover all bases by the parenthesised addition, “serving the whole of Munster”.

A fresh website and Facebook page have also been launched to help attract newcomers from across the Jewish spectrum to Cork’s Zoom-based fortnightly Friday night services and other online events.

Community chair Debra Davies explained: “We are the most local Jewish community for those who live within the six counties of Munster — Clare, Cork, Kerry, Limerick, Tipperary and Waterford. For these people we have a special responsibility in cases of need and life-cycle events.

“We have 140 on our database and over 50 fully paid-up members.”

Some members are Dublin-based, others are in the UK, or even America. “One of the blessings of online services is that location ceases to be an issue,” she added. The hope was that those living “relatively close together will be encouraged to get involved once we can meet in person again”.

Before the pandemic, the community was able to arrange just a few meetings a year “because we have such a low population density over such a wide area. These were generally well-attended —usually 20 or more for each event.”

Maintaining kosher provisions was difficult as these usually had to be sourced from Dublin. And there have been no simchahs in recent times.

Ms Davies added that some of its UK supporters used to live in Ireland, particularly Cork, “and this is also true of some of those who join us from Dublin. Mostly, the further away people who join us are ‘friends’.”

www.corkjewishcommunity.ie