Agoedas Achiem Synagogue, Kipstraat, Rotterdam

הקהילה היהודית

Agoedas Achiem grew out of the wave of refugees who left the Russian Empire after the pogroms of the late nineteenth century. Polish and Russian Jews held their own High Holy Day services in Rotterdam as early as 1889. They spoke Yiddish and found the services of the established Dutch congregations cold and distant, so, as in Amsterdam, they founded their own chewres. The members of Agoedas Achiem came from Russian-ruled Eastern Europe, and others from Galicia. The association's main purpose besides prayer was relief: it gave money, food and Passover parcels to poor immigrants and to transmigrants passing through Rotterdam from Eastern Europe and Belgium. In 1919 the board was enlarged from four to seven members, and in 1922 two chairmen, Gerschtanowitz and Auerbach, stepped down. At the 1928 consecration the founders were remembered by name: Carmusen, Wijnberg, Ruben Hildebrand, Sustrowitz, Salmanowitz, Spilke and Ettingen. Known gabbaim and board members in the 1920s and 1930s were E. Heiman, H. Gerschtanowitz, J.D. Friedberg, J. Rotstein, S. Glück, D. Rosenberg and E. Vromen. In 1928 part of the Galician group left and held its own services in a room on the Hofdijk under the talmudist Meir Landau.

אדריכלות ועיצוב

The synagogue was not a purpose-built building. It occupied the upper storey of the former Frascati building at the corner of Kipstraat 76 and the Smallesteeg, whose ground floor held a bicycle shop. The upper floor had been divided into six rooms; these were cleared and the whole storey was turned into one prayer hall with 100 men's and 80 women's seats, with folding chairs kept for visitors. No architect is named in the sources read. The interior photograph published in 1928 shows a plain hall with a flat ceiling hung with several chandeliers. The raised reading platform, draped in a dark cloth with a tall candlestick at each corner, stands in the middle, enclosed by wooden panelling and surrounded by plain wooden pews. At the far end is the ark, set in a recess under a wide inscribed board, with patterned stencilled decoration on the wall around it, and to the right stands a small cantor's desk with a Star of David on its cloth and a candelabrum. The ark itself was a gift from the cinema owner Abraham Tuschinski, given two years before the consecration. The exterior of the building is not shown in any image found.

החיים בבית הכנסת

The congregation kept the customs of Eastern European Jewry, and its services were held in the style its members had known at home. For the consecration on 29 July 1928 members gave the synagogue its furnishings: an ark curtain, a reading platform, a wedding canopy and chandeliers, with the Ehrlich and Narva families among the donors. A.U. Kleinmann was appointed as spiritual leader on a modest salary. Seats for the High Holy Days were rented out each year; an advertisement placed by the board told members to apply on a Sunday in September to D. Rosenberg at Hoogstraat 160 or to Brodman at Schiekade 114, and warned that nobody would be admitted without a ticket. The synagogue was best known in the city for Simchat Torah. The Eastern European members celebrated the festival with dancing processions with the Torah scrolls, which spilled into the street, and members of the other Rotterdam congregations, Chief Rabbi Davids among them, came to the Kipstraat to watch.

הרס

On 14 May 1940 the Nazi German air force bombed the centre of Rotterdam to force the Dutch army to surrender. The raid and the fires that followed destroyed most of the old inner city, including the streets around the Hoogstraat. According to the Rotterdams Jaarboekje of 1989 and Joods Erfgoed Rotterdam, the Kipstraat synagogue, the Hofdijk prayer room and the large synagogues on the Boompjes and the Gedempte Botersloot were all reduced to heaps of rubble. No source read describes the damage to the Kipstraat building in detail, and no photograph of its ruins was found. The congregation did not rebuild. Its Russian-origin members were given space in a house synagogue on the first floor above the poulterer B. Monderer at Spoorsingel 64b, where A.U. Kleinmann continued the services and the group also packed food parcels for pioneers in Palestine and for prisoners in Westerbork. The services there ended in March 1943, when they were banned. The rubble of the Kipstraat was cleared with the rest of the bombed city centre, and the street was later laid out on a different line.

גורל הקהילה

Rotterdam had 10,515 Jewish inhabitants in 1930. Under the Nazi German occupation the deportations from the city began at the end of July 1942 and were completed by the end of June 1943. Most Rotterdam Jews were assembled in Loods 24, a shed in the harbour, before being sent on; according to the Jewish Cultural Quarter, only 13 percent of the prewar Jewish population was alive at the end of the war. The house synagogue on the Spoorsingel where the Agoedas Achiem members had prayed since the bombing was closed in March 1943, when services there were no longer allowed. Too few of the Eastern European Jews of Rotterdam survived to revive the congregation after the liberation. The postwar community, which counted 780 people in 1951, gathered around the Lev Jam synagogue and in 1954 consecrated a new synagogue on the A.B.N. Davidsplein. Unlike Amsterdam and The Hague, Rotterdam has had no separate Eastern European services since the war.

האתר כיום

The site lies in the Hoogkwartier district of Rotterdam's city centre, which was rebuilt after the 1940 bombing on a new street plan. The prewar Kipstraat ran parallel to and north of the Hoogstraat, about sixty metres from the old town hall on the Kaasmarkt; the present Kipstraat follows a different course, so the corner of Kipstraat and Smallesteeg where the synagogue stood cannot be matched exactly to today's streets. No trace of the building survives and no marker for this synagogue is recorded in the sources read. The map pin marks the present Kipstraat as an approximation of the area and should not be read as the exact plot.

שמות בולטים