Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Fast Forward

Dutch Prince’s Ski Death Nixes Yom Kippur Fete

A farewell party for former Queen Beatrix scheduled on Yom Kippur was canceled due to the death of her son.

The Dutch Royal House postponed the Sept. 14 gala until early next year, according to a report Thursday by the NRC Handelsblad daily.

Prince Johan Friso, 44, died Aug. 12 as a result of injuries he suffered in a skiing accident in Austria. He had been in a coma for a year and a half.

The decision to hold the party in Rotterdam on Yom Kippur had disappointed some Dutch Jews when it was announced in May, as it would have prevented many representatives of Dutch Jewry from attending.

Rabbi Binyomin Jacobs, a chief Dutch rabbi, told JTA he was “not angry but pained” by the agenda conflict.

“I can see why the Jewish minority was overlooked in scheduling the event,” Jacobs said. “We are a very small minority. And that is painful.”

The Portuguese Synagogue in Amsterdam held a special prayer ahead of Prince Willem Alexander’s succession as monarch on April 30.

The Forward is free to read, but it isn’t free to produce

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward.

At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse.

Readers like you make it all possible. We’ve started our Passover Fundraising Drive, and we need 1,800 readers like you to step up to support the Forward by April 21. Members of the Forward board are even matching the first 1,000 gifts, up to $70,000.

This is a great time to support independent Jewish journalism, because every dollar goes twice as far.

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

2X match on all Passover gifts!

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines.
You must comply with the following:

  • Credit the Forward
  • Retain our pixel
  • Preserve our canonical link in Google search
  • Add a noindex tag in Google search

See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.