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The first Jewish legislator in Ireland, London-born Ellen Odette Bischoffsheim, 1857-1933 was an Irish Senator for 11 years, nominated by President W.T. Cosgrave for 4 successive terms, from 1922 to 1933, and 1 of only 4 women in the newly independent Ireland's Senate of 60 members in 1922. She married in 1881, was widowed aged 41 in 1898 and lived at *Aut Even*, Talbot's Inch, on the northern outskirts of my native Kilkenny City, in SE Ireland, from 1912 until her death in 1933, where my late maternal grandfather, Michael Davin, was her Estate Manager. She generously aided a very large range of developments, cultural, sporting, economic, around Kilkenny City, where the City Council honored her in 1910 with the *Freedom of the City* - she claimed to be the only woman in Ireland, and also the only Jewess in the world - till then - to be made an honorary citizen. For 5 years to 1927, when Bob Briscoe, a future Dublin Mayor, was elected a TD [= MP], Ellen was the only Jewish legislator in Ireland. Her active and generous life was a memorable testimony to the Tanakh command of Isaiah to be a *light to the Goyim*. She actively supported the revival of the Gaelic language in Ireland, and saw it as a parallel to the revival of Hebrew. She was buried, following Jewish rites, in Falmouth Cemetry, on the south coast of England, where her late husband had been buried when he died suddenly aged 53. Ellen was childless but to my late mother, Sarah, the youngest of her own family, who lived beside her until Ellen died when my mother was 21, Ellen became her second mother, who never forgot that Jewish mantra of Education, Education, Education. Ellen happily lived to see her graduate and begin a life-long career as a teacher. On Sept 12, 1930, aged 73, Ellen wrote to the *Jewish Guardian*, emphatically resenting *the unwarrantable assumption in your issue of Sept 5, that I have *deserted the faith* of my fathers. Will you please contradict that unfounded statement in your next issue ? I am, as I have been all my life, a staunch and practising Jewess,far too proud of my faith and race not to feel extremely indignant at the slur you have tried to cast on me*. My mother and her whole family recalled that Ellen indeed was always an observant and committed Jewess, and also a model of the inspiring and ongoing tradition of Jewish philanthropy, and of *Tikkun Olam*. http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:vzQXicODhSwJ:www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/louis-gustave-ricard-the-countess-of-desart-as-a-child+countess+of+desart&cd=6&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=ie&client=firefox-a