The Postwar Renewal of Jewish Communities in the Netherlands

Manfred Gerstenfeld

Preamble

In past decades, research in various areas of scholarship concerning the Holocaust has been integrated into a single discipline. Holocaust Studies has thus become a specific academic field. This development has made it possible to better understand the characteristics and impact of the Shoah, as well as to study its origins. Similarly, it would be beneficial to establish Post-Holocaust Studies as an academic discipline in its own right. Issues related to the Shoah in postwar societies should be studied within a single area of scholarship. Topics concerning the Holocaust which emerged after the Second World War in various disciplines are more than simply interrelated. They are so interwo- ven, that an integrated field of study is necessary. Issues discussed below, concerning Jews in the Netherlands after the Second World War, touch upon various disciplines. Only by analyzing them jointly can one obtain a better understanding of the characteristics and experiences of postwar Dutch Jewry. Post-Holocaust Studies, however, embrace many other areas than the ones discussed here. They also comprise how the Holocaust has impacted on legislation, for instance on human rights laws. Other impor- tant areas of these studies are Holocaust education and how the Holocaust has affected art. This in turn involves literature about the Holocaust period, theater, music, and so on. Another central field of Holocaust Studies is how Holocaust history is documented and researched. Abuses of Holocaust history and their categorization are yet another field in which much more research should be undertaken.294

* All references to works originally published in Dutch are to those editions. For the conve- nience of the reader, I have noted English editions when they exist. 294 Manfred Gerstenfeld, The Abuse of Holocaust Memory: Distortions and Responses (Jerusalem: Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs and Anti-Defamation League, 2009). See also id., “Continuing to Distort the Holocaust: 2009–2011,” in The Holocaust Ethos in the 21st Century: Dilemmas and Challenges, ed. Nitza Davidovitch and Dan Soen (Cracow and Budapest: Austria, 2012), 461–480.

Antisemitism Before and During the War

Jews had always been outsiders in the Netherlands to some extent. There was social antisemitism before the war. Some of its manifestations were that sev- eral social and sport clubs did not admit any Jews. There were professions, such as the diplomatic service, in which one did not find Jews, nor were there Jewish mayors. Social antisemitism in the Netherlands never involved extreme vio- lence. Before the war—other than during the Middle Ages in the territories which later became the Netherlands295—no Jews were ever killed just because they were Jewish. Remarks by former Dutch Deputy Prime Minister Els Borst illustrate this social antisemitism:

Before the war for instance, at family gatherings for a birthday, it was quite common to hear comments such as “a typical Jewish trick” or “the Jews take good care of themselves.” That was when someone had done something smart with money. I already noticed this as a young child. None of us would have wanted to do anything evil to a Jew. Yet there was a feeling of “they have done very well financially,” despite the fact that there were many very poor Jews in Amsterdam.296

Dutch Jewry was the hardest hit of all western European Jewish communities. There were an estimated 140,000 Jews in the Netherlands at the beginning of the German occupation in May 1940. Of these 107,000 were deported. Only 5,000 survivors returned, mainly from Bergen Belsen and Theresienstadt, and a smaller number from Auschwitz. From the end of 1943 until the liberation in May 1945, no Jews were seen in the public domain in the Netherlands. Non-Jews, other than those who were hiding or helping Jews, no longer maintained any connections with Jews. Such contacts before the war, however superficial, were multiple. This was not only true in Amsterdam, where approximately 9 percent of the pre-war population was Jewish. Of the original 25,000 Jews who went into hiding, an estimated

295 Bert M.J. Speet, “De Middeleeuwen,” in Geschiedenis van de Joden in Nederland, ed. Johan C.H. Blom, Renate G. Fuks-Mansfeld, and Ivo Schöffer (Amsterdam: Balans, 1995), 25, (Bert J.M. Speet, “The Middle Ages,” in The History of the Jews in the Netherlands, ed. Johan C.H. Blom, Renate G. Fuks-Mansfeld, and Ivo Schöffer [Oxford and Portland: The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2002]). 296 Interview with Els Borst, in Manfred Gerstenfeld, Judging the Netherlands (Jerusalem: Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, 2011), 207.