On a cold winter night in 2008, Wim Kortenoeven was startled by the crackling of a large fire raging near his home on the edge of this city’s last remaining Jewish enclave. Rushing from his apartment, Kortenoeven walked 70 yards and crossed the line separating his Jewish-owned housing project from the predominantly Muslim borough containing…
The Dutch government has asked the European Commission to recognize the former Nazi transit camp Westerbork as a heritage site. But the municipality in whose jurisdiction Westerbork lies, Midden-Drenthe, reportedly has rejected a plan to place memorial cobblestones in front of the homes of Holocaust victims – an ongoing project taking place in municipalities across…
Residents of the Netherlands can pick up a bolus (sweet roll) or some pom (a chicken dish) to eat almost anywhere in the country, but how many of them know that these foods have Jewish origins? Amsterdam’s Jewish Historical Museum is banking on curiosity about these and other traditional Jewish foods to bring people through…
The mayor of Amersfoort in the Netherlands returned a box of jewels to a Jewish man 70 years after his parents hid the box in their pharmacy. According to De Telegraaf, a Dutch daily, the parents of 73-year-old Bert Manasse hid the box in the cellar of the building and fled to Soest, a nearby…
A Netherlands church official apologized to a Jewish group for a memorial ceremony that commemorated Holocaust victims with soldiers who died fighting for Nazi Germany. Rob Mutsaerts, a bishop from Den Bosch in the southern Netherlands, in a letter last week expressed his regret to the small Jewish organization JFN. Mutsaerts apologized for a sermon…
A Dutch rabbi has demanded that the names of his relatives be removed from a monument which commemorates Jewish Holocaust victims along with German soldiers who died in World War II. “I don’t want my family members’ names to appear next to the names of German murderers,” Rabbi Wim van Dijk said in a filmed…
Chemical weapons, nuclear debris and Mossad agents in biohazard suits all have played prominent roles in the dozens of conspiracy theories surrounding the crash of an El Al airplane here 20 years ago this month. But Rob Oudkerk, vice chairman of the Dutch parliament’s inquiry into the deadly crash, has studied and dismissed them all….
When Jacob Nathan de Leeuwe found himself returning nearly two decades ago from his home in a suburb of Amsterdam to this isolated idyll he calls “the end of the world,” it undoubtedly was the pull of his roots. De Leeuwe’s family had lived in this semi-autonomous region in the northern Netherlands known as Friesland…
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