Didam Synagogue

OVERVIEW

The story of Didam Synagogue

Didam is a village in the Liemers district of eastern Gelderland, a few kilometres north of Zevenaar, and today part of the municipality of Montferland. A local press account says Jews are first recorded living there in 1664, and the community encyclopedia of the Joods Cultureel Kwartier (JCK) places their settlement in the eighteenth century. The congregation never grew large: by about 1800 it numbered roughly thirty people. It had a burial ground, known locally as the 'Joode Kerckhof', in use from about the middle of the eighteenth century, whose exact position is no longer known.

In 1770 the Jews of Didam fitted out a small synagogue inside a house on the Weemstraat, the street now called the Hoofdstraat. It was a house synagogue, a room for prayer within an ordinary dwelling rather than a purpose-built hall, and no picture or plan of it has been found. Sources differ on its later history. A 2025 article based on research by the local historian Henk Stevens speaks of a house synagogue around 1832 and says the last Jewish occupants left the house for Amsterdam in 1849. The JCK says the building stood until 1900, when it was demolished. The present house at Hoofdstraat 20 was built in 1932 and carries a memorial stone to the vanished community, unveiled in 1999.

LOCATION

Where it stood for 130 years

Historic: Weemstraat, Didam (house number unknown). Today: Hoofdstraat 20, 6942 AV Didam, Montferland, Gelderland, the house bearing the 1999 memorial stone (approximate: the stone is said to mark the synagogue site, but the original plot boundaries are not documented).

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The Jewish community

The Jewish presence in Didam was small but long-lived. A 2025 article in the Montferland Journaal, drawing on Henk Stevens's research for the Oudheidkundige Vereniging Didam, says Jews are first mentioned in the village in 1664 and that their numbers rose and fell over the centuries. The JCK encyclopedia, which treats Didam within its entry on Zevenaar, says Jewish families settled there in the eighteenth century and that the community had grown to just over thirty people around 1800. A Jewish cemetery is recorded from about 1762, but where it lay can no longer be determined. The JCK gives population figures only for 'Zevenaar and surroundings' as a whole, from ten Jews in 1716 to 117 in 1840 and 75 in 1930, so Didam's own numbers in the nineteenth century are unknown. The family named most often is Löwenstein: Aron Löwenstein married in Didam in 1840, and in 1863 Salomon Löwenstein was allowed to set up as a butcher; the family's kosher butcher's shop stood at Hoofdstraat 4. The Milgram family came in 1925 and the Bresler family in 1929.

Architecture and design

Nothing is known of the building's appearance. The sources describe it only as a small synagogue established in a house on the Weemstraat, the present Hoofdstraat, the old main street of the village. As a house synagogue it would have been a room within a dwelling, without the separate facade, gables or arched windows of the purpose-built village synagogues that larger Dutch congregations put up in the nineteenth century, but even that general description is an inference from the term used, not something a source states for Didam. The size of the room, the number of seats, the position of the ark and reading desk, and whether there was a women's section are all unknown. No architect or builder is recorded, and no drawing, plan or photograph of the house before its demolition in 1900 has been found. The house that stands at Hoofdstraat 20 today dates from 1932 according to the national building register, so nothing of the original structure is visible.

Life inside the synagogue

No document read describes worship in the Didam synagogue, its officials or its ritual objects. A congregation of about thirty people would have had difficulty assembling the ten adult men needed for a full service, and it is not recorded whether Didam had its own prayer leader, teacher or ritual slaughterer in the eighteenth century, or whether it relied on the larger community at Zevenaar. The community did maintain its own cemetery from about 1762, which suggests a functioning religious organisation in the decades around the opening of the synagogue in 1770. Later, a kosher butcher's shop run by the Löwenstein family at Hoofdstraat 4 served Jewish dietary needs in the village. The 2025 local account refers to a house synagogue around 1832 and says the last Jewish residents of the house left for Amsterdam in 1849; if services ended then, the room may have stood unused for half a century before the building came down. When the last service was held is unknown.

Destruction

The synagogue was not destroyed in war or persecution. According to the JCK community encyclopedia, the building on the Weemstraat, now the Hoofdstraat, was demolished in 1900; the English version of the same page says it was razed in that year. No source read gives the reason for the demolition, the owner of the house at the time, or who carried out the work, and no record of a sale by the congregation was found. The local account published in 2025 says the last Jewish occupants of the house moved to Amsterdam in 1849, which suggests that the house had passed out of Jewish use, and perhaps out of Jewish ownership, decades before it was pulled down. The national building register gives 1932 as the construction year of the present house at Hoofdstraat 20, so at least one later rebuilding followed on the plot.

The community’s fate

By the twentieth century only a few Jewish families lived in Didam, and the synagogue had long gone. During the Nazi German occupation of the Netherlands seven Jewish residents of the village were murdered. Simon Löwenstein, born in 1877, and his wife Paulina Löwenstein-Gans had run the butcher's shop at Hoofdstraat 4; they moved to Arnhem on 19 July (the year is not given in the sources read, presumably 1942), were arrested in a raid, held in Westerbork and killed in Auschwitz on 21 January 1943. The businessman Samuel Milgram of Wilhelminastraat 54 was arrested, according to local tradition while retrieving papers hidden in the chimney of his Didam house, and died in Auschwitz on 8 September 1943. Kajla Bresler and her sons Frits and Wolf, who had moved to Amsterdam, were deported to Sobibor in 1943 and murdered on arrival. Jacob Bresler, a trader, was deported towards Auschwitz and is thought to have died before reaching it. On 27 January 2025 seven Stolpersteine were laid for them in Didam at the initiative of the Oudheidkundige Vereniging Didam and the Oranjecomité Didam.

The site today

The synagogue stood on the Weemstraat, now the Hoofdstraat, in the centre of Didam. Combining the JCK, which says the 1999 memorial stands at the site of the former synagogue, with the 2025 local account, which puts it on Hoofdstraat 20, the site is the present private house at that number; the national building register gives 1932 as its year of construction, so it is a later building on or near the synagogue plot, not the original house. A memorial stone to the former Jewish community was unveiled on its wall on 28 November 1999. Its neighbours at numbers 18 and 22 date from 2009 and 1977. Nothing of the eighteenth-century synagogue is known to survive above ground, and the site of the community's cemetery remains unidentified.

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