The reports coming out of Amsterdam last Thursday evening were reminiscent of pre-Holocaust Europe, with violent gangs chasing Jews through the streets, beating them mercilessly and terrorizing anyone even suspected of being Jewish or Israeli. The Dutch city famous for its beautiful canals and picturesque tree-lined streets was suddenly a hotbed of extremism and anti-Semitic violence. The place where the Nazis murdered tens of thousands of Jews in the early 1940s once again had Jews fearing for their lives, but this time the culprits weren’t Germans; they were immigrants from Muslim countries.
In order to make sense of what happened, I spoke to Dutch Chief Rabbi Binyamin Jacobs. From his home in Amersfoort, just 35 minutes from the capital, he gave me an in-depth account of what transpired there that fateful night, and the context necessary to understand how and why this event unfolded.
“It sounds like it’s been a busy week,” I say as we begin the conversation.
“It was. I had gone to a small community for a Shabbaton so I was out of town, and I’ve been dealing with this ever since I returned home.”
“Are you originally from Amsterdam?”
“Yes. I was born here in 1949. My family has lived in Holland for many generations. One of my grandmothers came from Germany, but my other three grandparents were all Dutch. My grandmother’s grandfather was the chief rabbi of one of the four districts of Holland. Each one has its own chief rabbi: Amsterdam, Rotterdam, The Hague and Holland, and I’m the chief rabbi of the district of Holland. We all serve together on the vaad harabbanim, and I am the president of the vaad. However, at the present time, the other three districts don’t have a chief rabbi. That’s why people refer to me incorrectly as the chief rabbi of the country. The easiest way to refer to me is as “Dutch chief rabbi.” When the Jews came from Portugal and Spain after the Expulsion, they referred to themselves as Portuguese Jews because Holland was at war with Spain. My ancestor many generations back helped them settle into the country and served as their first chief rabbi, even though he was an Ashkenazi who came from Emden, Germany, and he and his family were allowed to be part of the Sefardi community. This was important because before World War II, there was segregation between the Sefardi and Ashkenazi communities.”
Before we get into what happened last week, I want to get a sense of the Jewish community and its history in Holland.
“What does the Dutch Jewish community look like today?”
“Unfortunately, 80% of Dutch Jewry was murdered during the Holocaust. That’s one of the reasons why I’m against the ‘institutionalization’ of Anne Frank, because when tourists come to Holland that’s all they hear about. They think that most of Dutch Jewry was saved because ‘the Germans came to kill the Jews, but the Dutch people tried to hide them.’ That’s a very wrong impression. The Dutch police took the Jews from their houses. Professor Presser, a postwar Jewish historian, wrote a famous research paper showing that 5% of the Dutch non-Jewish population actively collaborated with the Germans, another 5% resisted, and the other 90% just watched and let it happen. That 90% also includes those who snitched on their neighbors who were hiding and helping Jews, leading to both their murder and the murder of the Jews they were protecting.”
“Why don’t you consider those people part of the 5% of the collaborators?”
“Because there was a difference between them and those who actively spied for the Nazis on a daily basis. But my point is that the 90% weren’t mere bystanders; they obeyed whatever they were told by the Germans. This category also includes the government officials who within one week reported all of the Jewish statistics to the Nazis. Technically, they weren’t collaborating; they were simply doing what they had to do. But again, many were also guilty.”
“How many Jews were there in Holland before the Holocaust?”
“Before the war, the Jews were completely integrated into the country. Each and every small town had its own mikvah and community. The largest community was in Amsterdam, but there were Jews all over, unlike in other countries where the Jews were mostly concentrated in one or two areas. My district alone has 240 batei chaim. The Jewish population of the entire country was somewhere between 120,000 and 140,000, of whom 102,000 were murdered. Communication wasn’t very good in those days, and the Dutch Jews didn’t understand what was coming. The mentality was that they could understand what had happened to the German and Polish Jews, ‘But we are Dutch,’ they said. ‘That will never happen to us.’
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