Old Synagogue of Gorinchem (Havendijk)

La comunità ebraica

The first Jews were registered as citizens of Gorinchem near the end of the seventeenth century; Dutchjewry.org counts six registered between 1696 and 1787. By 1787 there was an organised community, and Salomon Hartog began keeping its birth register in January of that year. In December 1796 the leaders Aaron Nathan, Jacob Levy, Salomon David Rubens and Meijer Mozes signed a letter about a burial plot, and on 25 August 1814 the town allotted a cemetery on the Arkelsche Dijk, the same year the community bought the Havendijk building. The JCK gives 84 Jews in Gorinchem and surroundings in 1809 and 131 in 1840, the years either side of the synagogue's use; Dutchjewry.org gives 72 around 1816. Around that time the town had no rabbi, but it was the only place in the district where regular services were held, and the parnassim Joseph Samkalden and E. M. Hartog asserted Gorinchem's authority over Jews in nearby Leerdam. Most members of the congregation were merchants. The community kept growing through the nineteenth century and reached its peak around 1900.

Architettura e design

Very little is recorded about the building. It was a small church on the Havendijk, the quay along Gorinchem's inner harbour, described by the JCK as a former Lutheran church and by Dutchjewry.org as a former hidden church that had served several Protestant groups. Hidden churches in the Dutch Republic were usually built behind ordinary house fronts, which would fit the description of its entrance: worshippers came in from the back, near Burgstraat number 7, where the ritual bath (mikveh) and the women's section were also located. Nothing is known of its date of construction, its builder, its size, its seating or its interior fittings after conversion, and no drawing, plan or photograph of it has been found. Its later history suggests a solid structure: after its closure, according to Dutchjewry.org, it was rebuilt as a grain warehouse and stood until 1951.

La vita nella sinagoga

The building served as Gorinchem's synagogue from 1817 to 1837. Dutchjewry.org notes that until its inauguration in 1817 much improvising had been needed to hold prayer services. Around 1816 there was no rabbi in the town, and the community fell under the chief rabbi of Rotterdam, Casriel, whose salary was the subject of a dispute in 1815. The synagogue complex included a mikveh and a separate women's section reached from the rear entrance near the Burgstraat. Cantors and teachers in Gorinchem were usually the same person, and Dutchjewry.org counts at least twenty teachers between 1811 and 1940, but none is named for the years when this building was in use. The congregation's lay leaders in this period included Joseph Samkalden and E. M. Hartog, named as parnassim in 1815. No record of the services, customs or ritual objects of the Havendijk synagogue was found.

Distruzione

According to Dutchjewry.org the building was damaged in the bombardment of Gorinchem in 1814, the year the community bought it, and its condition worsened in the years that followed. In 1837 the municipal architect ordered it closed. The JCK community encyclopedia states that the building had fallen into disrepair and was razed in 1837. Dutchjewry.org gives a different account: after the closure it was sold, rebuilt and turned into a grain warehouse, survived a bombing in 1944 and was finally demolished in 1951. If that account is right, the structure the congregation had used stood for more than a century after it stopped being a synagogue, although by then it had been rebuilt and no longer functioned as one. Neither source says who bought it, who carried out the rebuilding, or who demolished it in 1837 or 1951, so the demolition actor is not recorded. The congregation worshipped elsewhere until its new synagogue on the Kweckelstraat opened in 1842.

Il destino della comunità

After 1842 the congregation worshipped in the Kweckelstraat synagogue, and it grew to 212 Jews in Gorinchem and surroundings in 1899 before declining to 93 in 1930. It supported a poor relief board, a burial society, a religious association, a society caring for the synagogue interior and, from the late nineteenth century, a branch of the Alliance Israélite Universelle. Under the Nazi occupation, Nazi German occupiers and Dutch Nazis (NSB members) badly damaged the Kweckelstraat synagogue in January 1941. Deportations began in 1942, shortly after the community celebrated that synagogue's centenary, and cost the lives of more than half of Gorinchem's Jewish residents; a later memorial commemorates 70 deported Jews of the town. Only a few returned, and 34 Jews lived in the area in 1951. The community was dissolved in 1964 and merged into the Jewish community of Rotterdam. The Jewish cemetery acquired in 1814 survives as a national monument.

Il luogo oggi

The building has gone, and no source consulted describes what now stands on its plot. Its exact position on the Havendijk is not documented in the sources read; the only locating detail is that its rear entrance was near Burgstraat number 7, so it stood on the block between the harbour quay and the Burgstraat in the old town centre. The Havendijk today is a quay of historic houses along Gorinchem's inner harbour. No surviving fragment or marker for this first synagogue is recorded. The map pin is placed at Burgstraat 7 as the nearest documented point and should be read as approximate.

Nomi importanti