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.
It’s our birthday and we’re still celebrating!
We hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, we’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s independent Jewish news.
This week we celebrate 129 years of the Forward. We’re proud of our origins as a Yiddish print publication serving Jewish immigrants. And we’re just as proud of what we’ve become today: A trusted source of Jewish news and opinion, available digitally to anyone in the world without paywalls or subscriptions.
We’ve helped five generations of American Jews make sense of the news and the world around them — and we aren’t slowing down any time soon.
As a nonprofit newsroom, reader donations make it possible for us to do this work. Support independent, agenda-free Jewish journalism and our board will match your gift in honor of our birthday!
Support our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.
