История Nieuw-Amsterdam Synagogue
Nieuw-Amsterdam and its twin village Veenoord grew up along the canals of the south-east Drenthe peat colonies, where Jewish traders settled in the course of the nineteenth century. Officially these families belonged to the Jewish community of Emmen, which the Dutch Israelite church body recognised as independent in 1876 and which built its own synagogue in 1878. According to the Jewish Cultural Quarter's community encyclopedia, Nieuw-Amsterdam (Veenoord) had its own synagogue from 1899. The Drenthe provincial encyclopedia Geheugen van Drenthe lists it as the last of the province's village synagogues, after Zuidlaren (1884) and Borger (1887), and records that local people called it the 'jodenkerkje', the little Jewish church.
The Jews of the village asked the national Jewish church body more than once to recognise Nieuw-Amsterdam as an independent congregation, and each time the request was refused, so the synagogue remained a dependent prayer house of Emmen. The village did, however, have its own Jewish cemetery on the Boerdijk. No address, plan, photograph or description of the synagogue building was found. After the Second World War the building outlived its congregation by a quarter of a century: Geheugen van Drenthe states that it was demolished in 1970. It is one of the Drenthe synagogues that have disappeared entirely.
Where it stood for 71 years
Historic: Nieuw-Amsterdam (Veenoord), municipality of Emmen, Drenthe; street and house number unknown. Today: unknown; placeholder pin at the centre of Nieuw-Amsterdam, municipality of Emmen (approximate).
Открыть большую карту →Еврейская община
Jewish settlement in south-east Drenthe followed the opening up of the peat bogs. The Emmen community, to which Nieuw-Amsterdam belonged, traced its start to the first Jewish traders who settled in the peat colony of Emmen around 1840; they were at first counted with Coevorden. Most earned their living in trade between farmers and the towns and later kept shops, and around 1900 about a fifth of Emmen's Jews depended on poor relief. The figures given for Emmen and its surroundings, which include Nieuw-Amsterdam, rise from 30 Jews in 1840 to 87 in 1869, 167 in 1899 and 182 in 1930. No separate count for Nieuw-Amsterdam or Veenoord was found. The village group was large and settled enough to open a synagogue in 1899 and to keep its own cemetery on the Boerdijk, and it petitioned the Nederlands Israëlitisch Kerkgenootschap repeatedly for recognition as a congregation in its own right. The church body refused every time, so Nieuw-Amsterdam stayed a branch of Emmen. No names of members, teachers or prayer leaders were found.
Архитектура и дизайн
No photograph, drawing, plan or written description of the Nieuw-Amsterdam synagogue was found, so its appearance, size and materials are unknown. The sources say only that it was a synagogue in its own right, opened in 1899, and that villagers called it the 'jodenkerkje'. Geheugen van Drenthe groups it with the province's village synagogues, as distinct from the larger buildings of Assen, Meppel, Hoogeveen and Coevorden, which suggests a modest building for a small number of families. Whether it was purpose-built or a converted house is not stated. The architect, builder, seating capacity, interior arrangement and street address are all unknown. The two unlabelled photographs on the Geheugen van Drenthe synagogue page were examined and show a different, larger brick synagogue, placed beside the Hoogeveen text, not this building.
Жизнь в синагоге
Because Nieuw-Amsterdam was never recognised as an independent congregation, religious life there was formally under the authority of the Emmen community and its board. The Emmen community kept a Jewish religious school, a study society for men and a women's society that looked after the synagogue interior, but the sources do not say whether the Nieuw-Amsterdam families had similar bodies of their own or used those in Emmen. With a synagogue in the village, local families had a place of worship of their own, and their repeated requests for separate status show they sought fuller independence from Emmen. The dead were buried in the village's own Jewish cemetery on the Boerdijk rather than in Emmen. No record was found of who led the services, how often a prayer quorum could be gathered, or what ritual objects the synagogue owned.
Разрушение
No source found records damage to the Nieuw-Amsterdam synagogue during the Second World War, and none says how the building was used during the occupation or in the years after 1945, when the village had lost most or all of its Jewish families. Geheugen van Drenthe states that the synagogue, the 'jodenkerkje', was demolished in 1970, a quarter of a century after the liberation. The same encyclopedia notes that apart from Emmen, Coevorden, Hoogeveen, Assen and Zuidlaren, all the Jewish houses of prayer in Drenthe have disappeared. Who owned the building at the time, whether it had been sold beforehand by the Jewish community, and who ordered or carried out the demolition is not recorded in the sources found. The demolition falls in the same postwar period in which other small Drenthe synagogues were pulled down, Beilen in 1952 and Meppel in 1960.
Судьба общины
The Nieuw-Amsterdam Jews belonged to the Emmen community, and the community encyclopedia of the Jewish Cultural Quarter gives no separate wartime account for the village. For Emmen it states that the Nazi German occupiers applied the same anti-Jewish measures there as elsewhere in the Netherlands and that in 1942 most of the community's Jews were deported to Poland and murdered. A few dozen people who had gone into hiding survived. The Emmen synagogue was used to store Jewish property during the occupation. After the war the figures for Emmen and its surroundings fell from 182 Jews in 1930 to 30 in 1951 and 34 in 1971, and a small community was re-established in Emmen, not in Nieuw-Amsterdam. How many Jews lived in Nieuw-Amsterdam and Veenoord in 1940, how many were deported and how many survived is unknown from the sources read; individual names could be traced through the Joods Monument.
Место сегодня
The site of the synagogue has not been identified in any source consulted, so it is not possible to say what stands there today. No remains of the building are recorded. The Jewish cemetery of the village, on the Boerdijk in Veenoord, survives and is maintained by the former municipality of Sleen, according to the Jewish Cultural Quarter. The map pin for this entry marks the centre of the village of Nieuw-Amsterdam as given by OpenStreetMap and should not be read as the synagogue's location. Fixing the address will need the Drents Archief, the cadastral records for the period 1899-1970, or local-history collections for Nieuw-Amsterdam and Veenoord.
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