I strongly recommend Nick Harriss Dublin's Little Jerusalem: a lively, generous, and ultimately sad elegy for a once-vibrant inner-city Jewish community. Harris is a retired businessman, ex-boxer, proud grandfather, co-founder of the Irish Jewish Museum. What began as a memoir for his family has ended up being a gem of autobiography and social history. The book has become a big hit in Ireland, but you don't actually need to be Jewish or indeed a Dubliner to appreciate it.

Since prosperity and emigration have sadly dispersed this once close-knit emigre community, this little memoir written by a lively citizen now in his eighties, provides a unique insight into a vanished Dublin world and a valuable record of the colourful past. Abrahamson, Cohen, Erlich, Harris, Isaacson, Spain, Woolfson and Zeider, they brought with them from the east of Europe, the rituals of Sabbath, the kosher rules and the elaborate rituals of richly cultured private lives.

Nick Harris takes us on a journey through his Dublin from the early 1920s up to the present day. Dublins Little Jerusalem is in essence Jewish Dublin-a busy community of Lithuanian immigrants quick to adapt to its newfound country and at the same time holding on to its time honoured customs, traditions and Yiddish language.

The reader is taken on a journey of Jewish households, personalities and daily routines-not unlike James Joyces 16th June 1904 (Ulysses). Harris does not attempt to be an historian or scholarly, but instead tells us his story in the manner of an old shanachí (Irish storyteller). The ghetto at the turn of the century was Dublins South Circular Road and its epicentre was Clanbrassil Street.

People came to shop-to buy kosher provisions from the Jewish shopkeepers, to collect the local gossip and pass it on to the wider community. Information about births, deaths and marriages was processed from person to person, through family contacts, community centres such as synagogues, community leaders and rabbonim.

Life for the Jewish community was not easy; housewives had accounts at the shops and paid off their grocery debts week to week.

The Harris household was an observant religious family and the children built friendships with Jewish and non-Jewish children from the neighbourhood. Summers were spent taking the steam train from Westland Row to Seapoint for a swim and family holidays at Bray, a favourite destination for Dublin Jewry.

Harriss father was a master tailor and each of his sons entered the business as they came of age.

Harris tells us about his secular education at St Catherine's primary school, Donore Avenue, and how he gained his religious education after school with his teacher Rabbi Gavron in St Alban's Road.

Harris was a keen sportsman in his youth and he highlights his involvement in boxing, soccer, rugby and table tennis. His mischievous side is illuminated by his description of boxing the fox (taking fruit from other peoples trees).

Fortunate to have a good voice he sang in the Greenville Hall Synagogue choir for many years. After school he enters the family clothing business and eventually branches out on his own to establish a successful trouser manufacturing company, marries Riv in 1942 and has two children.

Harris tells us about his lifelong commitment to communal activities-Jewish and non-Jewish charitable institutions.

We learn that the small Jewish community has three Jewish MPs in the Dail (Parliament). For the reader this is a walk down memory lane for those of us fortunate to have grown up in Dublin during the 30s, 40s, 50s and 60s. It is a kaleidoscope of Dublin personalities, a description of streets and buildings-more so, Harris captures a period worth remembering-a time to cherish.

DAILY LIFE in Dublins once-thriving Jewish community has been brought alive in a book called "Dublins little Jerusalem," by Nick Harris. Born in Dublin in 1915, Mr Harris points out that the community, which once numbered 5,500 is now down to about 1,300.

The book was launched in the Mansion House in the presence of the Chief Rabbi of Ireland, Dr Yaakov Pearlman.

Its title is drawn from the half-mile area around Clanbrassil Street-where Mr Harris grew up and where most of the Jewish community lived and worked for many years.

"I wanted to describe the situation faced by the early immigrants-including my own parents-when they landed in Ireland from Lithuania, having expected to go to America," he explained.

The book includes compelling portraits of the people and places that dominated "little Jerusalem," as well as a look at the contemporary Jewish community.

Sixty years ago there were 30 Jewish shops on Clanbrassil Street. Today there are two. The Adelaide Road synagogue has closed down. Nick Harris daughter and granddaughters live abroad. Older members of the community suggest bringing Jews from South Africa to live in Dublin. Harris asks why they'd want to come; its ruinously expensive, and the climate . . . ! He has accepted that the once thriving community has dwindled to almost nothing. If tragedy is too strong a word for this, it is a significant loss and a great pity for the city. Unable to remake the community, Harris has preserved its memory.

This book reads like an elegy. It is deceptively simple and deceptively uninteresting; Harris records in uninflected, courteous, almost flat prose, the details of Jewish life in Dublin, mostly between 1910 and 1950. There is charm but nothing electrifying or gut-wrenching here. There is not even much humour. Here is a typical passage: "The Cohen brothers had a sister who married Robert Isaacson, a brother of Julius and Max Isaacson. I remember that Robert Isaacson, Louis Baker (a brother of Manny Baker) and Michael Goldberg worked for my father as machinists when he had the factory on Ormond Quay."

This is unlike modern memoirs. It is polite and self-forgetting. Harris is not the subject; nor is he, in Christopher Isherwoods phrase, a camera. He is a recorder. He uses his remarkable memory to name everyone and describe every ritual. It is very moving, this careful and dignified act of remembrance for a lost community. You begin to understand that they matter very much, the names of the machinists in a forgotten clothing factory.

Its all here! Boxing the fox, OKeefes the knackers, Shamrock Rovers, swimming in Dun Laoghaire baths, the school around the corner-a goodly coddle of Dublin life, mainly centred in the Clanbrassil Street area of Dublin, an area which became known as Little Jerusalem. This is city life as told by an 86-year-old who is proud to be Jewish and equally proud to be part of the Dublin of the last 86 years. Nick Harris, who was seen on the RTE series Mono, giving us a grand tour of the area, was born just off the South Circular Road. He tells what it was like growing up in Dublin in a Jewish community, a growing-up not a great deal removed from the growing-up of a non-Jewish boy. The names sprinkled through this delightful book read like a who's who of Dublin-Briscoe, Danker, Elliman, Herzog, Mushatt, Noyek, Rosen, Shatter, Taylor, Wine and Woolfson-to name but a few of the wonderful people who contributed to our capitals business, professional and social life. Told simply, but with great attention to detail, this paperback is a must for Dublin aficionados.

Every day that I come into work I pass through one of the most evocative districts in the historic city of Dublin. I refer to Clanbrassil Street and environs, formerly a thriving Jewish community with many associations both historical and cultural.

Thousands of people pass along Clanbrassil Street each day, busily oblivious to the ghosts of the past. There are a few clues, such as the plaque on Number 52, noting that James Joyce chose this address as the birthplace of the most famous Jewish character in prose fiction, Leopold Bloom.

The street is bisected by South Circular Road at Leonard s Corner. The lower part has lost much of its character thanks to a road-widening scheme. Where Jewish mommas clucked and gossiped, the almighty automobile now holds sway.

Upper Clanbrassil Street still looks the way it must have done in Joyces time, though perhaps less bustling and a little more dowdy. This whole area was Dublins "Little Jerusalem", lovingly chronicled in a recent book of that title by a senior member of the Jewish community, Nick Harris.

I have a special affinity with this zone as a former pupil of the Christian Brothers in Synge Street, further along the South Circular Road. Its streets and side roads were part of the geography of my youth, explored by me and my friends after school as we sought diversion, entertainment and, frankly, just about any excuse not to go home to do our "ecker", as homework was called. Harriss book adds a new dimension to my knowledge of the area. He confirms the folklore of my youth, that some Jewish boys had been educated in the past by the Christian Brothers, such as Louis Elliman of the famous Dublin theatrical family, who went to Synge Street. Harris himself was taught by the Brothers at Westland Row, with two of his co-religionists. "The Brothers were strict," he writes, "and the leather strap was used, but I was never punished and neither were the other Jewish boys."

Had my friends and I known about this in a later era, we would have considered changing our religion!

It is a heart-warming and reassuring story that Harris tells, for the most part. He never heard the expression anti-Semitism until he went to Manchester for a debate in 1932. He reveals that most Jewish boys followed Shamrock Rovers-The Hoops-on the soccer pitch. Had Ireland eased immigration restrictions in the 1930s, many Jews could have been saved from the Holocaust and Harris greatly regrets this. But he is not bitter and even allows, with what some would regard as excessive generosity, that the tight immigration policy may have been due to "the high rate of unemployment".

Whatever knowledge the Irish authorities may have had, he points out that even the Jews of Dublin did not know what was really going on, because of the very strict wartime censorship. A neighbour of his, Ettie Steinberg, died in Auschwitz in September 1942: five years earlier he attended her wedding, which he still remembers as "a joyous occasion, full of Jewish ritual and tradition".

A 90-year-old mans memoir of life in Dublins Jewish community, which was published four years ago, is now in its fourth reprint. "Dublins Little Jerusalem," by Nick Harris, has sold more than 4,000 copies.

Mr Harris was born in Dublin to Russian parents. He grew up in Dublins south inner city in a district around Clanbrassil Street known as Little Jerusalem, where most of the towns Jews lived.

He has seen the Jewish population decline from around 5,500 in the 1930s to around 1,000 today.

He said: "I set out to share some of the memories of the family into which I was born in 1915 and of my life in the Jewish community. "I fortunately have a long and photographic memory. I was able to relate to events that took place before I was five years old. It is important to write, a book remembering events people have forgotten."

For the first time since the 1920s, there will be no Jewish TD present when the Dail meets on Thursday. Its a sign of the times. But recollections of a once exuberant community in Dublins Little Jerusalem will live on in a newly published memoir.

When Nick Harris was growing up in Dublins south inner city in the 1920s, in a district known as Little Jerusalem, if people wanted news and the latest scandal in the Jewish community, the myriad shops that lined Clanbrassil Street were the first port of call. As Harris affectionately recalls in his recently published memoir, Dublins Little Jerusalem, every aspect of Jewish life took place within a radius of less than a mile in the warren of streets off the South Circular Road. Jews have been in Ireland many hundreds of years; some records date back to the 11th century. The annual report of the Church of Ireland Jews Society in 1823 recorded 13 Jewish families in Dublin and stated: "Perhaps it is little known but, even in this city, there is a synagogue of Jews, who assemble in the private house of an individual."

However, it was not until the 1880s that a real growth in numbers occurred, when persecutions in the Russian empire resulted in a mass exodus from there.

The population of Jews in Ireland increased dramatically in the early years of the 20th century, rising from a paltry few hundred to more than 1,000 in the space of 20 years. Among the newcomers were Israel Bernard and Edith Chachanoff from a small Lithuanian town called Dobny Myser Mokilve-they were the parents of Nick Harris.

'I wish I had known more about my parents' lives,' says Nick Harris. 'This is why I set out to share some of the memories of the family into which I was born in 1915 and over 86 years of my life in the Jewish community."

While there has been a resurgence of interest in the history of Jews in Ireland in the last number of years, sparked by Prof Dermot Keoghs book, Jews in Twentieth-Century Ireland and Louis Lentins TV documentary, No More Bloom,s, Harriss is an account from the frontline. He was there, both as an eye-witness and as a participant in the chequered yet exuberant history of an immigrant group striving to establish itself. And Harris is an inveterate storyteller.

Yet the book might not have materialised had it not been for the encouragement of Harriss friend and neighbour, Joe Briscoe, to whom he recounted many of the tales in the book. Briscoe, who is a son of the late TD and lord mayor, Robert Briscoe, sees Harriss memoir as an important document of social history.

"The thriving Irish Jewish Community of the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s has, for the most part, disappeared," he says. "Despite a wealth of memorabilia in the Irish Jewish Museum, there is very little written material dealing with the day-to-day affairs of the Dublin community and with the many individuals who arrived here with nothing other than a yearning to leave the bitter past behind them and start a new life in a free society. How they succeeded from the most humble beginnings. The way they lived. The social scene. The many characters who abounded.

"Now that the Jewish community has shrunk to a microcosm of its former self, many people, mainly non-Jewish, want to know more about this exotic group who lived amongst them for so long. I know that, for many people, there was a feeling of sadness that no one had chronicled the lives and lifestyle of this unique group that was now disappearing. It was because of these facts that I pushed, persuaded and cajoled Nick into putting his memories on to paper."

As well as being an affectionate portrait of a vibrant and rich communal life, Harriss book is a reminder of the vastly disproportionate contribution Jews made to Irish national life. While most people have heard of the Briscoes, the Solomons family, Rabbi Herzog and Judge Herman Good-Harris reminds us that in business and other walks of life, Jewish people were active and a force for good. His account of the Elliman familys extraordinary role in promoting Irish theatre and cinema would surely have been forgotten otherwise.

What gets remembered and what gets forgotten is part of how a nation constructs itself, or chooses to view itself. On the one hand, we have a proliferation of historicism and the ennobling of one version of the past that has certainly excluded many stories. Harriss story is just as relevant for the history of Dublin as the Viking tours. He reminds us all of how an immigrant community was established, often through hardship and struggle, and that the streets of Dublin once boasted characters as rich and complex as any in Saul Bellows fictional Chicago or Bashevis Singers New York.

Harriss evocative memory of the formidable Beila Erlich, who ran a kosher butchers shop for 40 years, is of a woman who could have stepped straight out of the pages of a Singer short story. "How did they do it?" muses Harris. "Without knowing a word of English and with practically no help."

Nowadays, instead of observant Jews hurrying to Friday evening service, the South Circular Road has its mosque and its halal butchers. This very much echoes the "ethnic layering" of Londons Whitechapel, which has seen successive waves of immigrants, from the 17th-century Huguenots to Jews and Bangladeshis in the 19th and 20th centuries. The haemorrhage of Jewish people away from Clanbrassil Street began in the 1940s with increased affluence leading families to move to the Dublin suburbs of Terenure or Rathmines. Later generations went much further and emigrated from Ireland.

While the closure in May 2000 of the wonderful baroque synagogue in Adelaide Road and the loss of the last kosher butchers shop has fostered a sense of elegy and loss, Harriss book strives not to be an obituary, though a number of friends have confessed that his reminiscences brought tears at the memory of a bygone era. According to Dr Ronit Lentin of Trinity College, Irish-Jewish emigrants talk of constructing an imaginary Ireland (rather than, say, Israel or Lithuania, whence most of their ancestors hailed) in their countries of exile.

"They exist," says Lentin, "in a double diaspora, dreaming of an Ireland away from Ireland. In New York, for instance, the Loyal Yiddish sons of Erin used to celebrate St Patricks Day with green matzo balls."

But there is the more painful side of exile too, Lentin adds. "Young Irish-Jewish emigrants, while often seeking employment, or a partner, speak of being groomed from a very young age to emigrate from Ireland and seek a more satisfactory Jewish life abroad. The emigration of these well-educated young people is the real cost of anti-Semitism in Ireland."

Nonetheless, what is happening here seems to be a starker version of a Europe-wide trend, although this is fiercely contested by some Jewish groups.

Intense debate rages in Jewish communities about continuity. According to the controversial thesis by Bernard Wasserstein, European Jewry is a remnant of a vanishing diaspora.

Yet Wassersteins critics hit back at his gloomy forecast and cite Berlin and eastern Europe as evidence of a new flowering of Judaism. The Irish-Jewish community website (www.Irishjewishcommunity.com) encourages new blood in the community here, and gives "a few good reasons to move to Ireland", which include "the economy, a great way of life and a brilliant Jewish support network".

In the 1860s, there were not enough adult Jewish males in Ireland to constitute a minyan (the minimum of 10 required for services). Twenty years later came the exodus from Russia and the arrival of the ancestors of many Jews living here today. It remains to be seen if such a renaissance is possible here in the 21st century.

Though the Jewish presence in Ireland goes back many centuries, it was only as a result of persecutions in Russia and Eastern Europe that significant numbers began to come here in the 1880s. An eminent Irish political leader of the day, John Davitt, covered those persecutions as a journalist and wrote a book about them, The Crime of Kishineff, in 1903.

Nick Harris, whose parents came from Russia, was born into the Jewish community in Dublin in 1913. His family were religious Jews, as nearly all of Irelands Jews were until a recent date. Harris spent his own life working in the "rag-trade". But he was also involved in many community groups and charities. This delightful book carries on its cover a painting by Harry Kernoff of Winetavern Street. Dublins Jews lived far from that part of inner Dublin, but Harris, who owns the picture, sees it as an evocation of an older Dublin in which Jews played a prominent part. He includes a fascinating map of the Clanbrassil St area where he and his friends in fact live. This is a lovely book, warm with the sense of faith, family and community. It will be a treat for anyone at all interested in the recent past of our much changed Dublin, from which the Jewish community has now almost vanished.