Lew Jom Synagogue, Rotterdam

La comunità ebraica

Rotterdam had a large Jewish community: the JCK community encyclopedia gives 10,515 Jews in 1930. In the early twentieth century, as the city grew, Jewish families settled in the new western neighbourhoods, and the Schietbaanlaan area became a popular Jewish residential district, home also to the Jewish hospital and the old people's home. Several small neighbourhood synagogues were founded to serve these districts, Lew Jom among them. A 1989 article in the Rotterdams Jaarboekje says the association aimed to promote religious spirit and a sense of community among the Jewish residents of the west; it gives 16 June 1927 as its founding date, while also mentioning statutes approved in 1923. Its members were Jewish residents of the surrounding streets. Newspaper reports from 1928 to 1937 name many of them as donors of ritual objects, among them E. Eliazar, the Frank-van Creveld family, Minna Simons-Goldschmidt, L. L. van Leeuwen and Fred. de Jong.

Architettura e design

The building at Joost van Geelstraat 68-70 was an existing commercial property, about 9 metres wide and 13 metres deep, in a street of brick houses with flats above. Who built it and what business it first housed are unknown. The architect Jac. van Gelderen designed the conversion, which began in December 1927 on a budget of 6,000 guilders. According to the Rotterdams Jaarboekje of 1989, the conversion gave the building two spacious entrances. The only known photograph shows exactly this: a ground-floor front of brick piers with two pairs of glazed double doors, each crowned by a large Star of David set in the glass, beneath a plain horizontal fascia, with two storeys of ordinary dwellings above. Inside, the plan provided 82 seats for men and 24 for women; a report of January 1928 gave 104 seats in all. The fittings included an Ark, an almemor or bimah, lecterns and cupboards. The vestibule received a terrazzo mosaic floor in April 1928, and the prayer hall had stained-glass windows with emblems such as the priestly hands and the Levite washing jug.

La vita nella sinagoga

The consecration on 4 March 1928 was led by the cantor H. Vleeschhouwer and Rabbi Marcus Cohen; the association's chairman B. J. Stein gave the address, and an evening programme followed with the violinist Sam Swaap. At first services were held only on the Sabbath; weekday services began in 1935. In the 1930s B. J. Stein, administrator of the Stichting Montefiore, also served as Torah reader. Rabbi Cohen gave regular lectures on Rashi here. The members steadily furnished the synagogue: a menorah in 1928, a parochet the same year, Torah mantles in 1928 and 1936, a set of silver Torah ornaments presented on 13 June 1929 after a fundraising drive, a silver Torah crown given by L. L. van Leeuwen for his eightieth birthday, a new Torah scroll dedicated on 1 March 1931, and a silver eternal lamp in 1937 in memory of Bertha Schwab. In spring 1942 a series of cultural Sunday afternoon services was held here, and in December 1941 Dr Elchanan Stein and Eslina de Haas were married in the synagogue.

Distruzione

The building survived the Nazi German bombing of Rotterdam on 14 May 1940, which destroyed the synagogues on the Boompjes and the Botersloot; afterwards a group of Galician Jews found a home in Lew Jom and in the Hamerkaz synagogue. Services continued until 1943, when the Nazi German occupiers prohibited Jewish religious gatherings, and the building then stood unused. It reopened undamaged in May 1945. On 20 August 1954 the community inaugurated its new synagogue on the A.B.N. Davidsplein, and Lew Jom closed. The building was then fitted out again as business premises; the sources do not name the business or say whether the community sold it. It was demolished in the 1990s: Joods Erfgoed Rotterdam gives 1994, while the plaque on the site says the building stood until 1993. Who demolished it, and why, is not recorded in the sources consulted. A house was built on the plot.

Il destino della comunità

The Rotterdam Jewish community was destroyed under the Nazi German occupation. Jewish children were expelled from public schools in September 1941. Deportations began in late July 1942 and were completed by the end of June 1943; nearly all Rotterdam Jews were assembled in the harbour shed Loods 24 for deportation, and most were murdered in the Nazi death camps. According to the JCK encyclopedia only about 13 percent of the pre-war Jewish population survived, in hiding or in the camps. Lew Jom's own people shared this fate. Anna Cohen-Dzialowski, widow of the synagogue's rabbi Marcus Cohen, was murdered in Sobibor on 30 April 1943. Eslina de Haas, married in the synagogue in December 1941, and her baby daughter Lea were murdered in Sobibor on 11 June 1943, and her husband Elchanan Stein on 16 July 1943. After the liberation the survivors gathered at the Joost van Geelstraat; the first post-war service in Rotterdam was held there on the Sabbath before Shavuot 1945. The reconstituted community counted 780 members in 1951.

Il luogo oggi

The synagogue building no longer exists. Its plot on the Joost van Geelstraat, a residential side street north of the Schietbaanlaan in the Middelland district of Delfshaven, is now occupied by a house built after the demolition. A plaque on the facade of that house records that the Lew Jom Sjoel stood here until 1993 and that it was consecrated in 1928 and closed in 1954. The house carrying the plaque is numbered 92 today, whereas the synagogue's address was 68-70, so the street numbering appears to have changed when the plot was rebuilt. Nothing of the converted shop front survives.

Nomi importanti