Holland’s Holocaust ‘Homes’ Spreads to 8 Cities

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By JTA April 25, 2014

Two years after its inception in Amsterdam, a project that invites visitors to homes that once belonged to Jewish Holocaust victims has spread to eight Dutch cities.

The 2014 Open Jewish Houses initiative is scheduled to be held on May 3-5, the 69th anniversary of the liberation of The Netherlands from Nazi occupation, and will encompass dozens of buildings in the Dutch capital as well as Rotterdam, The Hague, Haarlem and four other cities, the news site museumkijker.nl reported earlier this month.

Organized by Jewish Historical Museum and several partner organizations, the project makes it possible for visitors to enter some of the homes of approximately 104,000 Dutch Jews who were murdered during the Holocaust, 75 percent of the country’s entire Jewish population. Some houses will feature lectures by survivors who lived in the homes before the Nazi invasion in 1940.

“This extraordinary initiative has generated a lot of interest, including among young people,” said Ronny Naftaniel, co-founder of Jewish Heritage in The Hague, or Joods Ergoed Den Haag, a not-for-profit organization which last year brought the project to The Hague for the first time.

“The curiosity stems from people’s realization of just how significant the Jewish contribution has been to the cultural life in the Netherlands,” he told JTA.

People who open their houses to the general public, Naftaniel said, “do it mostly out of respect for the victims.” Some residents of open houses during May 3-5 hang posters on their front doors with the names of the Jews who once lived in the homes and the words: “Never forget.” Visitors can choose which open house to visit on the initiative’s official website, www.openjoodsehuizen.nl, and its smartphone application.

Separately, the municipality of Utrecht okayed the erection of a monument to Holocaust survivors near the city’s railway’s museum, despite the museum’s objection.

Designed by the artist Amiran Djanashvili, the monument will consist of a steel memorial wall engraved with the names of the city’s 1,224 Holocaust victims and a large shofar.

Museum Director Paul Vlijmen objected to local activists’ plan to erect monument because he thought the museum devoted sufficient attention to the deportation of Jews to concentration camps.

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