Portuguese Synagogue Neveh Shalom, Maarssen

La comunità ebraica

Portuguese Jews from Amsterdam were present in Maarssen from the seventeenth century. According to the JCK community encyclopedia, some were involved in tobacco growing around Amersfoort and others tried without success to set up a silk industry. Their main presence, however, was seasonal: Zwarts describes the congregation as serving the prominent Portuguese families who had summer residences on almost all the large estates of Maarssen and Maarsseveen. Before 1719 services were held privately in Vegtevoort. Zwarts links the opening of a public synagogue to the Utrecht trading company of 1720, in which the States hoped to involve Portuguese Jewish capital, and to which the States themselves subscribed heavily. The congregation was formally organised under regulations of 1764, signed by members including Moses Bravo, Joseph Abrabanel, David Haim Abenator and Nathan Foa, which set a rotation of wardens. In 1749 it bought a burial ground on private land at Tienhoven, later called the Jodenbosje. The community declined from the middle of the eighteenth century and, according to JCK, had ceased to exist by 1839.

Architettura e design

The synagogue was not purpose-built. It began as an existing house, garden and outbuildings on the Zand opposite the estate Vegtevoort, bought in 1719 and converted for worship; at first a wall screened it from the road. In 1732 the wall was moved back so that the front stood on the public road, and on 1 October 1736 the congregation contracted the master carpenter Jan Sluijs for a large rebuilding. The east wall was taken down and the building extended by about three metres, the Torah ark was moved back to the new east wall on a raised platform with turned oak balusters, and the roof received a balustrade for torches. A new main door had pilasters, a cornice and blue stone bases. An oak staircase led to a women's gallery at the west end, screened by lattice work between six tapering columns, which Zwarts compared with the Louis XIV decoration of the Portuguese synagogue in The Hague. The women's gallery had eight rising benches, the men's hall oak benches against oak panelling. Community rooms and the cantor's house were in the same complex. In 1832 the synagogue measured 91 square ells.

La vita nella sinagoga

Neveh Shalom was a summer synagogue: it filled when the Portuguese families moved out of Amsterdam to their estates along the Vecht. Its fittings, listed in an inventory that Zwarts published in 1920, included ten candle brackets around the men's hall and four in the women's gallery, as well as brass, gold brocade, damask and silver. The 1764 regulations fixed the order of the congregation and a yearly rotation of the parnas and treasurer. The rebuilding contract of 1736 forbade any work on the Sabbath and Jewish holidays, on pain of a ten-guilder fine payable to the Reformed poor. A cantor lived beside the synagogue; David Brandon Belmonte, cantor and administrator, said in 1805 that he had served for twenty years. The congregation guarded its privileges carefully, keeping the packet with its charter and protection in its archive. In 1827 it successfully objected when a stair porch for the new village school threatened to cut off light to the corridor leading from the front door to the synagogue, and the council agreed to change the plan.

Distruzione

The synagogue was not destroyed by violence. Zwarts explains that a general impoverishment, in which the Portuguese Jews lost much of their capital, led many families to sell their country houses in Maarssen, so that the summer synagogue gradually became superfluous. Its closure was delayed as long as possible. In 1839 the building, the garden and the cantor's house were sold separately, the synagogue itself for demolition. The JCK encyclopedia also says that in that year the synagogue was sold and pulled down. The brass, the ark, the gold brocade and damask and the silver went to Amsterdam. Neither source names the buyer or the person who carried out the demolition, and no account of the demolition itself has been found. A domed vault in a building on the Breedstraat has been suggested as a possible remnant of a Portuguese house synagogue, not of this building.

Il destino della comunità

The Portuguese congregation of Maarssen did not end in persecution but faded away over the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Its members were mainly Amsterdam families who used Maarssen as a summer retreat, and as their fortunes declined they sold their estates and stopped coming. The JCK encyclopedia says the community had ceased to exist by 1839, the year the synagogue was sold. Its ritual objects were taken to Amsterdam. The congregation's most lasting trace is its cemetery at Tienhoven, bought in 1749 and still used for burials into the twentieth century. The cemetery is badly decayed, and in April 2004 the regional landscape trust Landschapsbeheer Utrecht proposed a thorough restoration. The separate Ashkenazi community of Maarssen and Nieuw Maarsseveen continued long after the Portuguese congregation was gone and is treated in its own entry. What became of the descendants of the Maarssen Portuguese families in the Holocaust is part of the history of the Amsterdam Portuguese community and is not documented separately for this congregation.

Il luogo oggi

The synagogue stood on the Zand in Maarssen, opposite the estate Vegtevoort, beside the garden of the castle Ter Meer, with its back garden bordering the estate Richmond; the village school was built against one of its walls in 1827. Zwarts printed a nineteenth-century photograph of the spot after the building had gone, showing trees and a row of houses along the street. The exact plot has not been matched to a present-day address in the sources consulted. The map pin is placed on the Zandweg in the old centre of Maarssen, which appears to be the historic Zand, and is approximate. No part of the building is known to survive.

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