Old Synagogue of Den Helder (Kanaalweg, 1837)

Die jüdische Gemeinde

The first Jews settled in Den Helder around 1790; the businessman Israel Salomon is recorded in the 1790s, and Heyman Aron Polack settled in the town in 1801. Services were first held in a private house, and in 1806 the community bought a building near the Smidstraat and Breestraat, in the lane later called the Jodensteeg, which was fitted out as a synagogue about two years later. The community numbered 72 in 1809. Growth came with the opening of the North Holland Canal in 1824: there were 256 Jews in 1840 and 470 in 1869, the peak. A Jewish cemetery was laid out at Huisduinen in 1827, and in 1837, the year of the new synagogue, a Jewish school was built with financial help from the Rothschild family. The synagogue council had seven members, who also ran poor relief, and quarrels over money sometimes needed the mayor's mediation. After the North Sea Canal opened in 1876 the community shrank, to 322 around 1899 and 196 in 1930.

Architektur und Gestaltung

No description of the building's form and no picture of it were found in the sources read for this entry. What is recorded is its setting and one detail. The municipality gave the community a plot on the Kanaalweg, the road along the North Holland Canal, very close to the Zeedijk, the sea dyke of the old town. Construction started in April 1837 and was finished in time for consecration at Rosh Hashana the same year, which suggests a modest building put up in a few months. A local history of Den Helder by J. M. Ente van Gils, published in De Huisvriend in 1902, calls it the Jewish 'temple' founded in 1837 on the Kanaalweg and quotes the Hebrew inscription it carried, rendered in Dutch as 'De Eeuwige is in Zijn Tempel, zwijgt voor Hem, gij gansche aarde!'. The architect, the builder, the cost, the seating capacity and the arrangement of the interior are unknown. The English pages of the Jewish Cultural Quarter call it 'an impressive new synagogue', but give no detail.

Leben in der Synagoge

The consecration in September 1837 was a civic event. Midday prayers were said for the last time in the old synagogue in the Jodensteeg, and then four Torah scrolls were carried about two kilometres to the Kanaalweg. A naval band led the procession, followed by girls carrying flower baskets, twelve young men bearing the banners of the twelve tribes, the synagogue council, members of the community and town officials. A choir greeted the scrolls at the door. A cantor from Hoorn sang psalms and a song written for the occasion by a Mr Delaville, the junior rabbi of Amsterdam, Berenstein, gave the inaugural sermon, and the service closed with a prayer for the Royal Family. In the following decades the community's religious official usually served as cantor, ritual slaughterer and teacher at the Jewish school. Several societies were active, among them a study group, a burial society, a youth association, a cultural association and a women's society that looked after the synagogue's interior. For the building's sixtieth anniversary in 1897, Mozes Philip Polak composed a cantata.

Zerstörung

The 1837 synagogue was not destroyed by violence. By the 1920s, after decades in which the community had shrunk from its nineteenth-century peak, the building had become dilapidated, according to the community history on dutchjewry.org. The congregation decided to build a new synagogue, and the Jewish Cultural Quarter records that in 1928 the old building was replaced by a new one on the same site. Since the foundation stone of the new synagogue was laid on 2 May 1928 and it was inaugurated in August 1928, the old synagogue must have been pulled down in late 1927 or early 1928 to clear the plot. No account of the demolition itself was found: who carried it out, whether any fittings were reused in the new building, and the exact date are not recorded in the sources read.

Das Schicksal der Gemeinde

The congregation that had worshipped in the 1837 building moved into its successor on the same site in 1928, and in 1930 it numbered 196. In 1940 Den Helder was bombed by the Nazi German forces, and about 38,000 inhabitants left the town, some of its Jews among them. Those who remained were deported in 1942 by the Nazi German occupiers, by way of Amsterdam and the Westerbork transit camp; according to the Jewish Cultural Quarter none of them returned. During the occupation the Nazis razed the harbour district of Den Helder, including the 1928 synagogue, to build coastal fortifications. Near Den Helder, a training village for young Jewish refugees from Germany and Austria at Nieuwesluis in the Wieringermeer, opened in 1934, prepared about 685 pupils for emigration to Palestine before the Nazi occupiers closed it in 1941. In 1951 only 24 Jews lived in Den Helder and the surrounding area, and in 1964 the remaining congregation merged with that of Alkmaar.

Der Ort heute

Nothing of the 1837 synagogue survives. Its plot on the Kanaalweg near the Zeedijk was reused in 1928 for the new synagogue, and that building in turn was razed during the Second World War when the Nazi occupiers cleared the harbour district for fortifications. The exact house number of the plot has not been found, so it is not possible to say which modern building or open space now covers it; the map pin marks the western part of the Kanaalweg, the stretch nearest the old sea dyke, and is approximate. The Jewish cemetery at Huisduinen, laid out in 1827 and used by the congregation throughout the life of the building, is the community's main surviving physical trace in Den Helder.

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