Jewish Cemetery in Small Dutch Town Gets New Lease on Life
Jewish and non-Jewish volunteers rededicated a 200-year-old Dutch Jewish cemetery after decades of neglect.
The opening of the cemetery in Woerden in the center of the Netherlands on Wednesday was its first since 1973, de Week Krant reported.
Jewish and Christian volunteers worked for six months to restore the headstones at the cemetery, according to the report.
At the end of the ceremony, members of the area’s Jewish community said Kadish for several dozen people buried at the cemetery.
Separately last month, the weekly reported, the Dutch city of Wageninegen joined a growing number of European municipalities in installing memorial cobblestones in front of the homes of murdered Jews.
In total, the city now has 36 memorial cobblestones, a concept developed in the 1990s by the German artist Gunter Demnig. He has installed at least 40,000 cobblestones across Europe, he said in June. The bronze cubes bear the names of the victims.
“These stones provide passersby with a moment of reflection,” Wageningen Mayor Geert van Rumund said during a ceremony last month.
In Wageningen, where Jews lived from 16th century onward, memorials mark onetime Jewish butcher shops and bakeries as well as the homes of Jewish civil servants and one scientist, the report said.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.
We’ve set a goal to raise $260,000 by December 31. That’s an ambitious goal, but one that will give us the resources we need to invest in the high quality news, opinion, analysis and cultural coverage that isn’t available anywhere else.
If you feel inspired to make an impact, now is the time to give something back. Join us as a member at your most generous level.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
