And IMDonehere, let's say "jewish" is a kind of nationality, with an ethnic component (born of a jewish mother) and a religious component (converted)
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Sorry, Menachem, but that is not accurate. Even as the conservatives in Israel consider a political vote on who is a Jew, Jewish is not a nationality as Muslims and Christians are Israelis.

And while Jewish tradition considers a child born from a Jewish mother to be Jewish that has nothing to with ethnicity, it is matrilineal, a biological designation of descent.

Jewish is simply a religious affiliation whether by birth or conversion, just the way Muslims and Christians can be of any color, ethnic, nationality, or culture.

menachem...thank you for asnswering my question,..and for sharing your fascinating history with us. I'm a writer and I've been interviewing Jews in every corner of Europe all these years. Many of whom found their way into my stories. I feel certain that you will forgive my being "nosy"...
stu

IMDonehere, that's why I wrote "a _kind_ of nationality". Because it's easy to see that "jewish" still escapes definition somewhat. It's not fully ethnic, because anyone can become jewish. It's not fully religious, because even if I don't keep the commandments, I'll still be considered jewish. It's not "israeli" either, because jews exist as jews without having to be israeli.

It's also meaningful that after 1813, when jews were granted full civil rights in the Netherlands, the jewish community was called "the Jewish nation". A nation without territory, with a national religion, that has always been a difficult concept to handle.

@tower, gladly done. Jews of my generation in The Netherlands all tell more or less the same stories. Only now, things are normalizing somewhat, psychologically, for that "second generation", the children of shoah survivors. Jews are now almost invisible as a culturally functioning group. Lately there have been attempts to outlaw kosher slaughter, and there's a perennial debate to do the same with circumcision. So there's pressure, and you might say that it's no longer viable to be religiously jewish in The Netherlands. It's worse in some other countries though: France, Scandinavian countries... Ironically, on the continent, Germany is now the country with one of the largest and most vibrant jewish communities in Europe.

Fascinating film. Thank you for sharing and thanks for the history lesson, everyone.

On one of my trips to Amsterdam, I believe in 1998, I got caught up in a squatters protest at the Zuiderkerk. My husband & I were on the Waterlooplein when we saw banners being unfurled from the tower of the Zuiderkerk. Even though they were written in Dutch and we had no idea what they said, the banners drew us to them, where a small crowd had formed on the plaza in front of the church. As we waited for something to happen, the crowd got larger, and larger, and larger. Then the police arrived, in full riot gear!! We were expecting some kind of performance art and got a squatters protest instead. But that was okay, because everyone remained peaceful and we got a history lesson.

Robyn :)>-

There was huge opposition to the Opera House/City Hall complex that is now on Waterlooplein. Earlier, there had been violent protests at the way metro station Nieuwmarkt was built, demolishing huge numbers of housing. And earlier the intention was to build a freeway right through the middle of the Nieuwmarkt area to connect Weesperstraat to the IJtunnel. Protests against this were so fierce, that the project was stopped, eventually.

There is a memorial to this, on Jodenbreestraat, approximately where the Rembrandthuis is. If you walk towards Nieuwmarkt frrom there, you'll see a monument, a pillar supported by a turtle. On the plinth, there's one of Jacob Israel de Haan's beautiful quatrains about Amsterdam, honouring it as the "jerusalem of the west".

And if you go into metrostation Nieuwmarkt, you'll still see signs from the Nieuwmarkt riots: photos on the wall of the station and inlayed in the platform "housing is not a favor but a right"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0mBQJN4PW6U

https://www.flickr.com/photos/arthur-a/5375319934/

Incidentally, the Rembrandt house was, in the nineteenth century, far more well known as "the minyan of the Spitz family"

There was huge opposition to the Opera House/City Hall complex that is now on Waterlooplein>

Yes it was called I believe "Stopera" - I witnessed some of the Stopera protests.

Yes, Stopera is STadhuis/OPERA

Menachem: Have you ever met Judith Belinfante, one-time director of the new Jewish Museum in Am'dam? Reasom I ask, I met Judith and her husband who were visiting my next door neighbors...on Hollywood Beach in Oxnard, Ca. back in the 80's. She had just taken over as Director..fascinating and quite a beautiful woman. On one of my Am'dam visits she was away to a conference so we never did meet again.

WW2 was a terrible time for most in Holland and Amsterdam - well especially harsh on Jewish or gay or the mentally challenged, etc but from folks I've talked to most people suffered greatly due to food shortages - they did in fact resort to eating flower bulbs - but there were quite a few collaborators as is also the case - the Dutch Resistence Museum contains many many visuals and artifacts of this harsh harsh time that is hard to fathom in today's 'tolerant' laidback Amsterdam.

I think the Anne Frank House should be incuded on everyone's Amsterdam visit list - it is so so sobering - much like concentration camps I have been too and to imagine such a sweet girl like Anne ended up in Auschwitz-Birkenau I think. Terrible terrible times and I feel for all who suffered but especially Jewish folks and others put on trains to the East.

@tower: I know her from afar, let's say. It's such a small community that everyone knows everyone else. I know two of the curators, Hetty Berg and Edward van Volen, Edward because he also served as rabbi to the reform congregation, but in Arnhem, not in Amsterdam.

It's a great museum and she gave it such a great start in its, then, new home in the synagogue complex on JD Meijerplein.

I must say, I do respect people wanting to visit the Anne Frank House, but imo, the Jewish Historical Museum is so much more to the point, and interesting, and alive, a living expression of the jewish community in Amsterdam. Whereas I see the Anne Frank House as more of an epitaph to the Frank family and as a testament to both Dutch heroism and Dutch collaboration. I lived around the corner from it for quite a while, but I never could make myself go and visit.

Unfortunately in Dutch, but here is a short documentary about Ed van der Elsken's photo of the Sal Meijer sandwich shop, the only jewish business standing in the old jewish neighbourhood before it moved to Scheldestraat.

It moved to Rijnstraat a couple of years ago, so you can still go there. Everyone who is anyone in jewish Amsterdam will go there for lunch on sunday afternoon. And their pastrami sandwiches are a reason in itself to want to go there.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Re1V5c-r1CY

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s7NwUylw2XA
And in the second link, Ed' commentary about a "jewish neighbourhood without jews"

We visited the Anne Frank House earlier this year. We have also visited Auschwitz.

It is important that there are various ways people remember the Holocaust. The Anne Frank House is more ghostly reminder while the camps embody the horror. For me, and I have read many others, the most moving exhibitions at Auschwitz, were not the remnants of the crematoria or the railroad siding, but the exhibition cases filled will glasses and hairbrushes, which create an immediate emptiness.

And I agree with Stu, that the Jewish Historical Museum was more poignant and instructive, as to Jewish life past and present.

Yes i had the same experience at Auschwitz, the hairbrushes, yes. But also the notion, that everywhere you would dig, there's ashes. I went in 2008, with one of Bernie Glassman's "bearing witness" retreats, and we spent a week there, just sitting, bearing witness, in silence. One of the most difficult experiences of my life. Until then, my main means of confrontation had been Claude Lanzman's "Shoah". And of course the stories that weren't to be told, but were always alluded to in my family.

The sobering thing to me when visiting say the grimmest of camps Birkenau, where the trains came in and some were sent right to the gas chambers and others to work (Auschwitz was mainly a work camp I think) but at Birkenaus the gas chambers and train platform just struck such a horror in me - and the sobering thing was that it just was not that long ago.

And Germany was a so-called civilized cultured country - just proves could always happen and is in some parts of the world - genocide - menachem's parents and grandparents must have gone thru a Hell we can never imagine - Stu's and IMD's too and all Jewish folk.

when I visit those camps I feel Jewish too!

One of my professor's in grad school was Tom Keneally who wrote what was called Schindler's List in America, but called Schindler's Ark in all other English speaking countries. (His US publisher thought Americans would confuse it with something like Noah's Ark.)

Tom is an Australian Irish Catholic who studied for the priesthood when he was much, much younger. But his humanity is always present in all his work. His first book was "The Chant of Jimmy Blacksmith" about the abuse of Australian Aborigines. His latest about women and WWI. One need not be of any faith, gender, color, nationality, or religion to have empathy for another.

One need not be of any faith, gender, color, nationality, or religion to have empathy for another.>

Something radical Muslims have yet to learn!

Radicals in general, PalenQ. Lack of empathy towards or tolerance for others not convinced of your particular form of radical thought is not confined to the Muslim faith.

No it is not and certainly has not be so in the annals of even Christianity but in modern times we do not here much fire and brimstone the likes of the radical Muslims, who are a very very small % of Islam - but the likes of ISIS cutting off innocent peoples heads is medieval - of course Dick Cheney is just as guilty of medieval barbarism or advocating it but at least he does not base it in religion - or that religion would disown him!

Last century over 150,000,000 died at the hands of other humans. At least 100,000,000 were killed in or by what are considered Christian countries.