The Jewish religious heritage continuum: Jewish religious communities’ interactions with synagogues and ceremonial objects in Amsterdam

ABSTRACT

This article explores how rabbis, directors and members of Amsterdam’s Jewish religious communities view the heritagisation of Jewish religious life by analysing how they interact with Amsterdam’s main synagogues and their collections of ceremonial objects. It focuses on the synagogues of the Jewish Cultural Quarter – the Portuguese Synagogue with its accompanying Sephardi community, and the former Ashkenazi synagogue complex, now the Jewish Museum. From a dynamic heritage perspective, this heterogeneous constellation raises questions about how and why heritage making occurs here. Following a Constructivist Grounded Theory methodology, concurrent data collection and analysis let emerge interrelated conceptual categories that explain how communities interact with these functioning and musealised synagogues and objects: Embodying the transmission of tradition; Instrumentalising the heritage of Jewish religious life; Transforming the beauty of holiness; and Assembling in heritagised synagogues. These categories intersect in the core category of the Jewish religious heritage continuum, which this article presents as a dynamic embodiment of remembering, reconnection, and revival of Jewish tradition. For the interviewees, these performances, and the deployment of functioning and musealised synagogues and collections, form a cultural apparatus that marks their present, diverse and living material culture and grafts a Jewish future onto a Jewish past.

KEYWORDS:

• Synagogues
• ceremonial objects
• heritagisation
• musealisation
• Jewish museums
• Jewish religious communities

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank the interviewees for their willingness to participate in this research and for welcoming him into their homes and synagogues; Professor Emile Schrijver and Dr Hester Dibbits for their guidance and support; and Dr Judy Jaffe-Schagen for being a companion along the way. He would also like to thank the editors and the two anonymous reviewers for their careful reading of the manuscript and their helpful comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Declaration of consent

The Ethics Committee of the University of Amsterdam granted ethical approval for this study on 1 June 2021 (2021-FGW_OTHR-13752). Collection and processing of data was done in accordance with General Data Protection Regulation. Names of interviewees have been withheld where requested (e.g. KKTT#1 and LJG#1). Interviewees signed a consent form, and reviewed the portions in which they are quoted or paraphrased before the article was submitted.

Notes

1. The Jewish Cultural Quarter was launched in 2012. Besides the Jewish Museum and the Portuguese Synagogue, the Jewish Cultural Quarter includes Jewish Museum junior, the National Holocaust Museum and the National Holocaust Memorial at Hollandsche Schouwburg and Ets Haim Library. In 2021, the Jewish Historical Museum was renamed ‘Jewish Museum’. The Portuguese Synagogue is still used by the Portuguese community as a place of worship and is known as the Snoge, from the Spanish esnoga.

2. In this article, ceremonial objects are: klei kodesh, objects that are sacred because they bear the name of God and tashmishei kedushah, which are sacred for being in close contact with klei kodesh; tashmishei mitzvah, key ritual tools, and reshut, objects that only serve to beautify the ritual act (Auslander 2017, 839; Heimann-Jelinek and Schmid 2022, 39–40).

3. Interview with Rabbi Shmuel Katz, Jewish Cultural Centre, Amsterdam. June 16, 2022.

4. Synagogue service commemorating the Ashkenazi Community’s tercentenary, November 14, 1935. Martin Monnickendam, 1935. Acquired with support of the Jewish Cultural Quarter Foundation. Collection Jewish Museum, M003250. The candelabrum is named after Sarah Rintel, who donated the object to the Grote Sjoel in 1753. In 2017, the NIHS sold the ‘Rintel’ to the museum. Collection Jewish Museum, M014776.

5. Interview with Michael Minco, interviewee’s office, April 6, 2022.

6. Interview with Rabbi Abraham Rosenberg, Portuguese Synagogue, Amsterdam. November 1, 2022.

7. Interview with David Cohen Paraira, Portuguese Synagogue, Amsterdam. May 11, 2022; Interview with Hans van Veggel, interviewee’s home. March 20, 2023; Interview with Sam Herman, Portuguese Synagogue, Amsterdam. June 8, 2023.

8. Interview with Mirjam Knotter, via Microsoft Teams. October 1, 2020; Minco.

9. Van Veggel.

10. The Torah scrolls are excepted; they remain the property and responsibility of the Portuguese Jewish Community

11. The standard work by Blom et al. (2017) provides a comprehensive survey of Dutch Jewish history with background to the developments referred briefly to in this section.

12. Interview with Ruben Vis, Jewish Cultural Centre, Amsterdam. April 7, 2022.

13. Interview with Boaz Cahn, Reinwardt Academy, Amsterdam. February 27, 2023.

14. Interview with Rabbi Hannah Nathans, interviewee’s home. November 2, 2022.

15. Cohen Paraira.

16. Interview with Rabbi Menno ten Brink, Liberal Jewish Community synagogue, Amsterdam. May 12, 2022.

17. The copy (1898) was made for the Dritt Sjoel, which, like the Grote Sjoel, is part of the Ashkenazi synagogue complex, now the Jewish Museum.

18. Interview with Paula Blocq, Obrechtsjoel, Amsterdam. March 9, 2023; Interview with Paula Blocq, via telephone. March 28, 2023.

19. Each year, the Obrechtsjoel welcomes hundreds of visitors on Heritage Day; Museum Het Schip, which showcases 1920s Amsterdam School architecture, organises monthly tours.

20. Minco.

21. Katz. The Gerard Dou shul (1891) is one of the few purpose-built synagogues in nineteenth-century Amsterdam. Coenen Snyder (2012) discusses the development of synagogues in that period in detail.

22. Ten Brink.

23. Herman.

24. Interview with Bar Vingerling, Portuguese Synagogue, Amsterdam. November 28, 2022.

25. Nathans; Rosenberg.

26. Nathans.

27. Rosenberg.

28. Vis.

29. Vingerling; Interview with Ruben Troostwijk, Jewish Cultural Centre, Amsterdam. March 20, 2023.

30. Cohen Paraira.

31. Rosenberg; Vingerling.

32. Interview, KKTT#1, interviewee’s home. May 27, 2021.

33. Vis.

34. Interview with Rabbi Binyomin Jacobs, interviewee’s home. March 27, 2023.

35. Ten Brink; Cahn; Minco.

36. Minco.

37. Interview with LJG#2, interviewee’s home. February 7, 2023.

38. Vis; Ten Brink; Minco; Katz; Vingerling; LJG#2; Cahn.

39. Blocq.

40. Rosenberg.

41. The Portuguese Jewish refugees, who had lived as Catholic conversos – compelled to convert, yet often secretly adhering to their Jewish identity as so called crypto-Jews – on the Iberian Peninsula for several generations before coming to Amsterdam, invited the Ashkenazi rabbi Moses Uri Halevi (c.1544–1627) of Emden to serve as their spiritual leader in 1601.

42. Cohen Paraira.

43. Minco.

44. Rosenberg.

45. Herman.

46. Rabbi Jacobs inspected the scroll [collection JHM M002298] in 1998 and declared it pasul. E-mail conversation, Henrike Hövelman, Head of Collections and Knowledge, Jewish Cultural Quarter. September 27, 2021. When visiting the Israel Museum in Jerusalem (June 2022), I noted that rabbinic advice had also been sought regarding the display of a pasul scroll in the ‘Jewish Art and Life’ galleries.

47. Ten Brink; Interview with LJG#1, Reinwardt Academy, Amsterdam. March 30, 2022; LJG#2; Nathans; Rosenberg; Troostwijk.

48. Troostwijk recalls that in addition to the brit milah (circumcision) of his son, a Jewish marriage also took place here in 2005.

49. LJG#1.

50. Cahn.

51. Nathans.

52. Cahn; Katz, Troostwijk.

53. The prayer said upon entering a functioning shul (Numbers 24:5); LJG#2.

54. Minco.

55. LJG#1.

56. Cohen Paraira.

57. LJG#1.

58. Jacobs.

59. Chief Rabbi Meir Just accused the museum of allowing Jewish Enlightenment ideals to prevail over religious principles (Just 1987a, 1987b).

60. Minco; KKTT#1; Troostwijk.

61. Troostwijk.

62. My thanks to Rabbi Katz for allowing me to attend the Hanukkah celebration at his personal invitation.

63. Rosenberg.

64. LJG#2.

65. Herman.

66. Vingerling.

67. Examples are exhibitions such as Are Jews White? (2021) which examines where Jews stand within the current spectrum of identity and representation politics and Me, Jewish? (2023), in which a diverse group of Dutch Jews show how they deal with (their) Jewish identity.

68. Interview with Merav Krone, Portuguese Synagogue, Amsterdam. May 16, 2023.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Dutch Research Council (NWO) under Doctoral Grant for Teachers number 023.019.035.

Notes on contributors

Paul Ariese

Paul Ariese ([email protected]) is a senior lecturer at Reinwardt Academy, Amsterdam University of the Arts, and a graduate of the School of Museum Studies, University of Leicester (MA with distinction). He lectures on religious heritage and exhibition development for the international Master’s programme in Applied Museum and Heritage Studies and the Bachelor’s programme in Cultural Heritage Studies. He is affiliated as fellow of the University of Groningen’s Centre for Religion and Heritage. Ariese is currently engaged in research for his PhD on The Sacred in Musealised Synagogue Space: Representations of Jewish Religious Life in the Amsterdam Jewish Cultural Quarter at the Amsterdam School for Heritage, Memory and Material Culture, University of Amsterdam.