Holland: Effort to Improve Amsterdam's Zeeburg Cemetery

Holland: Effort to Improve Amsterdam's Zeeburg Cemetery
by Samuel D. Gruber

(ISJM) Thousands of foreign tourists visit some of Amsterdam's famous Jewish sites every year, notably the great Esnoga, or Portuguese synagogue (1675). Tens of thousands of Dutch attend the exhibits and events at the Joods Historich Museum, located in a group of historic Ashkenazi synagogues, including the Great Synagogue (1671). Art historians are familiar with the old Jewish cemetery of Ouderkirk with its many elaborately carved and inscribed gravestones.  But few people - within Holland or abroad - are aware of the great Zeeburg cemetery, reputed to be Europe's largest Jewish cemetery, containing between 100,000 and 200,000 graves, and now neglected and in ruin. (click here for photos).

According to Jan Stoutenbeek and Paul Vigeveno (Jewish Amsterdam, 2003) the Zeeburg Cemetery was opened in 1714 and because it was in walking distance to Amsterdam it became the resting place of the city's poor Jews who could not afford the contribution to the Jewish Community allowing burial at the Muiderberg Cemetery.

By the 20th century, Zeeburg was filled, and a new cemetery at Diemen was consecrated. Zeeburg fell out of use, and the after the the relatives and descendants of the buried there were mostly killed in the Holocaust, and the cemetery was left to fall into disrepair, most recently serving used for paintball games by local teenagers.

On Sunday, October 30, 2011, Amsterdam’s Stichting Eerherstel Joodse Begraafplaats Zeeburg (Rehabilitation Foundation for Jewish Cemetery Zeeburg) began a collaborative program for Moroccan and Jewish youth to clean the large and neglected Zeeburg Jewish cemetery. On six Sundays, as many as 100 young people will collaborate to improve the condition of the cemetery and in the process to learn more about the history of Jews of Amsterdam.

The program to engage young people in the protection of the cemetery was initiated by Frans Stuy and Jaap Meijers who in contacted the Foundation for Rehabilitation Zeeburg. Jaap Meijers said "The cemetery is completely overgrown, it's a jungle. There is a huge wall built around it and making it impossible for regular visitors to visit. We are now looking for the original gate, which is still somewhere, and with the the help of young people, to make it presentable again. Of course we also hope that it will initiate awareness. "

For more information on the cemetery and plans for its restoration go to the Foundation webpage.

Holland: Project to Commemorate Former Jewish Residents

Amsterdam, Holland. Monument to Jewish Resistance in WWII. Photo: Samuel Gruber

Amsterdam homeowners asked to commemorate former Jewish owners

In a new effort to remember the everyday lives of Jews killed in the Holocaust, in the spirit the highly successful German Stolpersteine project ("Stones of the Vanished" or "Stumbling Stones") of which I have previously written, a new effort to mark the houses of former Jewish residents of Holland has been announced. This project is in its infancy and it remains to see what interest and action it will inspire.

In addition to the internationally known Anne Frank House, hone of the most visited tourist sites in Amsterdam; and the Jewish Historical Museum, one of the best Jewish historical and cultural venues in Europe; Amsterdam also already has numerous monuments and plaques marking Jewish heritage and Holocaust sites and and commemorating Holocaust victims. The best on-line guide to the Jewish history of Amsterdam on the museum's website.

The following article is from Associated Press was published in Haaretz:

More than 70 percent of Holland's wartime Jewish population were killed by the Nazis; The dutch will mark the end of the war on May 4 with solemn ceremonies of remembrance.

By The Associated Press

A commemoration committee is asking thousands of Amsterdam homeowners to mark their houses if a former Jewish resident was arrested or deported to Nazi death camps during World War II.

The May 4-5 Committee, named for the date of the Netherlands' liberation from German occupation in 1945, made posters available Friday for display in windows of the former Jewish homes.

The poster reads: "1 of the 21,662 houses where Jews lived who were murdered in World War II."

Residents can look on the committee's website to see if their house had been occupied by a Jewish family during the war and the names of the people who had lived there.

More than 70 percent of Holland's wartime Jewish population were killed by the Nazis. The Dutch mark the end of the war on May 4 with solemn ceremonies of remembrance, followed the next day by parties and music to mark Liberation Day.

The poster was the initiative of Frits Rijksbaron, a marketing executive who discovered the title deed to his new home showed that it had once belonged to a Jewish family.

He told Dutch broadcaster NOS that he hoped to remind Amsterdam's citizens of the horrors of the Nazis' sweep of their city, during which some 61,700 Jews were arrested and killed.

He wanted "to show how big a trauma it was for the Jews and for Amsterdam, and how Jewish Amsterdam was."

Poland: Extensive Marker Program Recalls Warsaw Ghetto Boundaries

Poland: Extensive Marker Program Recalls Warsaw Ghetto Boundaries
by Samuel D. Gruber



(ISJM) When I was recently in Warsaw I took most of a day to walk around the area of the Warsaw Ghetto which had, of course, also been among the most densely populated Jewish neighborhoods of the city before the Shoah. I made my way to many of the monuments which I already knew, and I wanted to get a sense of where the new Museum of the History of the Jews in Poland would rise - across from the Ghetto Uprising Monument by Natan Rapoport.

This part of Warsaw is a baffling one, since there are entire layers of history - streets, buildings, houses, stores, people - all lost beneath the post-war and post -Ghetto building boom that transformed this area into vast acres of wide streets and big apartment blocks. The Ghetto monuments are among the few distinctive landmarks.

Gone too, is any sense of the perimeter of the Ghetto, the infamous Wall which figured so mightily in wartime reality and post-Holocaust imagination. Together with the chimneys of the Death Camp crematoria, the Warsaw Ghetto Wall is the architectural form that has came to represent most the suffering of the Poland's Jews under German occupation. As the Ghetto was made smaller, as the wall tightened, so too did Jewish hopes diminish. But today, wandering the new Warsaw cityscape - where is the wall?

To my surprise, I came across a new monument on ulica Bielanska, not far from the site of the (destroyed) great Synagogue, that gave me a clue about the Wall. I had not heard of this monument and it is not yet included on any map or in any guide. As it happens it is but one small part of an ambitious new project by the City of Warsaw and the Ministry of Culture in cooperation with the Jewish Historical Institute (JHI) is bringing the memory of the wall back. The work is still in progress, but will be officially inaugurated at the JHI on November 19th.

This project of Ghetto memory sees the city as a palimpsest - and under the lines of the new street the old patterns can still be seen - albeit faintly. 21 bronze reliefs are being installed along the route of the Ghetto wall. 13 reliefs are placed on still-extant patches of wall used as part of the Ghetto enclosure. The rest are set onto freestanding stelae. Together they mark the ghetto border when it was at its biggest. Explanatory texts help orient the viewer. Some of these markers - the ones where no part of the wall survives - include strips of pavement labeled "Ghetto Wall" that are embedded in the surrounding pavements and give a sense of exactly where the wall once was. This method of tracing outline of lost walls is not new (a good example is the memorial for the Orphan Boys' Home in Amsterdam, where an outline of the building in whose site is mostly covered by the new Town Hall was laid out with ceramic tiles in the surrounding pavement by artist Otto Treumann), but in Warsaw it is done very well.

I'm very impressed by this project. It is one of the very best that I have seen anywhere that endeavors to reorient the viewer to an historic topography rather than the contemporary one. For Jewish sites this type of evocation of lost places is essential, since throughout Europe so much of Jewish culture is lost, destroyed and built over. The Warsaw project demonstrates that there are ways that are both aesthetically and didactically satisfactory - that these lost places and spaces can be recalled, if not actually recovered. The effort to create and install a system of distinct but related markers is important. Whether for the Ghetto Wall, or for relocating Jewish communal institutions or any other set of sites, a system indicates that recovered sites were not individual, casual or accidental creations, but they are part of a complex network of places and community now gone. This technique can work with any kind of lost heritage, not just Jewish. But for Jewish heritage - especially in cities once full of Jews where few physical remains survive - markers are a must.

I don't know who is responsible for this new marker system, but I am sure my friends Eleonora Bergman, Director of the Jewish Historical Institute and Jan Jagielski, researcher of Jewish sites par excellence are involved. Both Lena and Jan, by the way, have new books out about Jewish Warsaw before and during the Ghetto period. I'll write about them another time.

Association of European Jewish Museums 2008 Annual Conference scheduled for 22 to 25 November in Amsterdam

Association of European Jewish Museums (AEJM) 2008 Annual Conference
22 to 25 November in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.

The Association of European Jewish Museums (AEJM) has announced its 2008 Annual Conference to be held 22-25 November in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. The conference, which is the first and best opportunity for European Jewish museum professionals to gather to discuss issues and projects of mutual concern, is open to members of AEJM and invited guests.

This year's conference is hosted by the Jewish Historical Museum in Amsterdam, which will present its completed program of expansion and redesign, including the restoration of the former Ashkenazi Great Synagogue and the re-installation of the exhibition within its space.
Other themes to be addressed at the conference workshops are:

1. Collection Management issues: Database / Digitization.
2. Education / Children’s Programs.
3. Object identification: case-study Mediene (provincial Jewry) Project.

To learn more about the AEJM and AEJM membership go to their website. AEJM welcomes representatives of Jewish Museums and Judaica collections from throughout Europe. Representatives from other museums and related institutions are also welcome to participate on a limited basis. To find out more about the conference program and eligibility to attend and participate, contact Sara Tas at sara@jhm.nl.