Beilen Synagogue

The Jewish community

In 1809 Beilen and its surroundings had 21 Jewish inhabitants, in 1840 26, in 1869 71, in 1899 69 and in 1930 65, according to the Jewish Cultural Quarter's encyclopedia. Many were traders who travelled the countryside; the local historian H.M. Luning writes that many members were poor without needing relief, and that the one Beilen Jew on poor relief was supported by the Jewish board of Hoogeveen. A few Jews from Westerbork also attended services in Beilen. The congregation was organised from 1850 and was a branch of the community of Assen. In 1860 it founded a burial society and bought a cemetery on the open field (es) at Eursing, now within Beilen-Noord, which the municipality still maintains. Children were taught by teachers from neighbouring communities, and from 1903 religious lessons had their own building. Beilen had no ritual bath, so members used the ones in Assen and Hoogeveen. Luning describes the Jews of Beilen as wearing Drenthe dress and speaking the local dialect, using Yiddish among themselves.

Architecture and design

The only view found is a photograph reproduced by the Historische Vereniging Gemeente Beilen in 2007, captioned 'De synagoge aan de Schoolstraat'. It shows a small, free-standing brick hall with a pitched tiled roof. The gable front has a projecting stepped cornice with a small decorative finial at its peak, a round window with a brick surround in the gable, two iron wall anchors in the shape of fleurs-de-lis, a small rectangular stone between them, and two tall round-headed windows with arched brick hoods below. The side wall has several tall rectangular windows. The façade stone, now preserved, bears the Hebrew opening of Psalm 84:2, 'How lovely are your dwelling places, Lord of hosts', with the dates 1885 and 5645. The architect, builder, cost, seating capacity and interior arrangement are unknown, and no interior view has been found.

Life inside the synagogue

The consecration in 1885 was a village event: M. Koekoek of Hoogeveen gave the address, and the following day the congregation held a ball accompanied by a horn band from Groningen. Luning notes that these celebrations must have cost the small and largely poor community a great deal. No rabbi of its own is recorded; as a branch of Assen the congregation relied on teachers from neighbouring communities for religious instruction. When the congregation marked the synagogue's fiftieth anniversary in January 1935, the rabbis Hartz and Lichtenstein came from Groningen, and Hartz spoke of the Jewish nation finding a safe refuge in the Netherlands; the celebration ended with song and dance. The choice of Psalm 84 for the façade stone, Luning suggests, expressed both piety and the members' sense of being at home in Beilen. The congregation's own burial society cared for the cemetery at Eursing.

Destruction

After the Jews of Beilen were deported, the synagogue was looted. The Jewish Cultural Quarter's encyclopedia states that its contents were stolen and that the Nazi German occupiers then used the building as a garage. Luning writes that it was stripped of everything except its walls and roof; he does not say who did the stripping. After the liberation the municipality, with the consent of the Jewish community of Assen, converted the empty shell into a school room, spending money on it in 1947. In 1949 the Israëlitisch Kerkgenootschap, the national Jewish body, offered it for sale. Negotiations with the municipality stalled over the 1947 costs until the Roman Catholic board in Assen showed interest. In 1951 a council decision gave the old synagogue to the municipality free of charge, in exchange for repairing the cemetery fence and maintaining the cemetery permanently. The synagogue was demolished in 1952. The sources read do not record who carried out the demolition or why, although the municipality owned the building at the time.

The community’s fate

In May 1940 there were 52 Jews living in Beilen. Westerbork, built in Beilen municipality in 1939 as a camp for Jewish refugees from Germany, became from 1942 the transit camp through which most Dutch Jews were deported to the east. The Jews of Beilen were deported by the Nazi German occupiers to extermination camps, and only twelve of them survived the war. The Jewish Cultural Quarter's encyclopedia records that Beilen's mayor refused to cooperate with the deportations, and was dismissed and banished from Drenthe; his name is not given there. In the night of 2 to 3 October 1942 Jewish patients were also taken from the Beileroord psychiatric institution in Beilen and deported via Westerbork to Auschwitz. Too few Jews returned to sustain a congregation. In 1950 the independent Jewish community of Beilen was formally dissolved and merged into that of Assen.

The site today

The synagogue stood on the Schoolstraat in the centre of Beilen. The exact plot has not been identified in the sources read, and what stands on it today is unknown. Since 1991 the façade stone of the synagogue, with its Hebrew verse and the dates 1885 and 5645, has been displayed in the hall of the Beilen town hall. The Jewish cemetery at Eursing, bought in 1860, survives; after the Noordveld housing development of the 1990s it lies screened by a small public garden among houses in Beilen-Noord and is maintained by the municipality.

Notable names