About Jewishness

Early history
Jews seem not to have lived in the province of Holland before 1593; but a few references to them are in existence which distinctly mention them as present in the other provinces at an earlier date, especially after their expulsion from France in 1321 and the persecutions in Hainaut and the Rhine provinces. The first Jews in the province of Gelderland were reported in 1325. Jews have been settled in Nijmegen, the oldest settlement, in Doesburg, Zutphen, and in Arnhem since 1404. In 1349 the Duke of Guelders was authorized by the Emperor Louis IV of the Holy Roman Empire of Germany to receive Jews in his duchy. They paid a tax, granted services, and were protected by the law. In Arnhem, where a Jewish person is mentioned as a physician, the magistrate defended them against the hostilities of the populace. When Jews settled in the diocese of Utrecht does not appear. (However, rabbinical records regarding kashrut - Jewish dietary laws - speculated that the Jewish community in Utrecht dated back to Roman times.) In 1444 they were expelled from the city of Utrecht, but they were tolerated in the village of Maarssen, two hours distant (walking), though their condition was not fortunate. Until 1789 no Jew might pass the night in Utrecht; for this reason the community of Maarssen was one of the most important in the Netherlands. Jews were admitted to Zeeland by Albert, Duke of Bavaria.
In 1477, by the marriage of Mary of Burgundy to the Archduke Maximilian, son of Emperor Frederick III, the Netherlands were united to Austria and its possessions passed to the crown of Spain. In the sixteenth century, owing to the persecutions of Charles V and Philip II of Spain, the Netherlands became involved in a series of desperate and heroic struggles. Charles V had, in 1522, issued a proclamation against Christians who were suspected of being lax in the faith and against Jews who had not been baptized in Gelderland and Utrecht; and he repeated these edicts in 1545 and 1549. In 1571 the Duke of Alba notified the authorities of Arnhem that all Jews living there should be seized and held until the disposition to be made of them had been determined upon. In 1581, however, the memorable declaration of independence (Act of Abjuration) issued by the deputies of the United Provinces deposed Philip from his sovereignty; religious peace was guaranteed by article 13 of the Unie van Utrecht. As a consequence the persecuted Jews of Spain and Portugal turned toward Holland as a place of refuge.

Sephardim
The Sephardim (so-called Spanish Jews) had been expelled from Spain and Portugal years earlier, but many remained in the Iberian peninsula, practising Judaism in secret. The newly independent Dutch provinces provided an ideal opportunity for the crypto-Jews to re-establish themselves and practise their religion openly, and they migrated, most notably to Amsterdam. Collectively, they brought trading influence to the city as they established in Amsterdam.
In 1593 these Marranos arrived in Amsterdam after having been refused admission to Middelburg and Haarlem. These Jews were important merchants and persons of great ability. They labored assiduously in the cause of the people and contributed materially to the prosperity of the country. They became strenuous supporters of the house of Orange and were in return protected by the stadholder. At this time the commerce of Holland was increasing; a period of development had arrived, particularly for Amsterdam, to which Jews had carried their goods and from which they maintained their relations with foreign lands. Thus they had connections with the Levant and with Morocco. The Emperor of Morocco had an ambassador at The Hague named Samuel Pallache (1591-1626), through whose mediation, in 1620, a commercial understanding was arrived at with the Barbary States.
In particular, the relations between the Dutch and South America were established by Jews; they contributed to the establishment of the Dutch West Indies Company in 1621, of the directorate of which some of them were members. The ambitious schemes of the Dutch for the conquest of Brazil were carried into effect through Francisco Ribiero, a Portuguese captain, who is said to have had Jewish relations in Holland. As some years afterward the Dutch in Brazil appealed to Holland for craftsmen of all kinds, many Jews went to Brazil; about 600 Jews left Amsterdam in 1642, accompanied by two distinguished scholars - Isaac Aboab da Fonseca and Moses Raphael de Aguilar. In the struggle between Holland and Portugal for the possession of Brazil the Dutch were supported by the Jews.

Baruch Spinoza

With various countries in Europe also the Jews of Amsterdam established commercial relations. In a letter dated November 25, 1622, King Christian IV of Denmark invites Jews of Amsterdam to settle in Glückstadt, where, among other privileges, the free exercise of their religion would be assured to them.
Besides merchants, a great number of physicians were among the Spanish Jews in Amsterdam: Samuel Abravanel, David Nieto, Elijah Montalto, and the Bueno family; Joseph Bueno was consulted in the illness of Prince Maurice (April, 1623). Jews were admitted as students at the university, where they studied medicine as the only branch of science which was of practical use to them, for they were not permitted to practise law, and the oath they would be compelled to take excluded them from the professorships. Neither were Jews taken into the trade-guilds: a resolution passed by the city of Amsterdam in 1632 (the cities being autonomous) excluded them. Exceptions, however, were made in the case of trades which stood in peculiar relations to their religion: printing, bookselling, the selling of meat, poultry, groceries, and drugs. In 1655 a Jew was, exceptionally, permitted to establish a sugar-refinery. One particular Sephardic Jew also stood out during that time: his name was Benedictus de Spinoza (or Baruch Spinoza). He was excommunicated from the Jewish community in 1656 after speaking out his ideas concerning (the nature of) God in his famous work Ethics.
On December 12, 1670, the Sephardic Jewish community of Amsterdam acquired the site to build a synagogue and construction work began on April 17, 1671, under architect Elias Bouwman. On August 2, 1675, the Esnoga (Portuguese Shul) was finished.

De Pinto House in Amsterdam (now public library)

Sephardim
In 1607 Rodrigo Alvares Pinto's ancestors arrived from Portugal in Antwerp, as "new Christians". In 1645 the family moved from Antwerp, where they gathered their fortune with shares in the East-Indian Company, to Rotterdam. Only in 1647 all male members of the family gathered in Rotterdam to get circumcised. After 150 years the family could be openly Jewish again. Abraham and David de Pinto were the cofounders of the Portuguese-Jewish community in Rotterdam.
In 1651 Ishac de Pinto bought the De Pinto House in the St. Antoniesbreestraat in Amsterdam, for the price of 30,000 guilders. He called it "Pinto's Court". The De Pinto's were a rich Sephardi family of merchants and bankers, and some refer to them as the "Rotschilds of 17th century Amsterdam". In 1669 the "Yeshiba de los Pintos", a Jewish school, was founded in the De Pinto House by Abraham de Pinto and his brother David.
In 1680 David Imanuel de Pinto rebuilt the De Pinto House.

The Tulpenburg estate of the De Pinto family

Due to the plague, many rich people moved temporarily out of the city and bought estates in the country, near Amsterdam. In 1717 David de Pinto (1692-1751) bought the villa Tulpenburg, near Ouderkerk (for 34,000 guilders), and besides stadholder Willem IV many important people visited the place, like Frederick the Great (Frederick II of Prussia), and Stanislaus Leszczynski, Duke of Lorraine and ex-King of Poland. (It is also said that Spinoza stayed on the estate for a while, but this cannot be confirmed.)
With William IV proclaimed stadholder (1747), the Jews found another protector after William III. William IV stood in very close relations with David de Pinto, the head of the De Pinto family, at whose villa he and his wife paid more than one visit.
In 1748, when a French army was at the frontier and the treasury was empty, David's second son Isaac de Pinto (1717-1787) collected a large sum and presented it to the state. Van Hogendorp, the secretary of state, wrote to him: "You have saved the state."
Isaac was a philosopher of the Enlightment, as well as a banker, a political economist, music lover, art lover, and managing partner and one of the main investors of the V.O.C. (Dutch East India Company).
In his "Reflexoens Politicas, tocante a constituicao da nacao judaica" (Amsterdam, 1748), Isaac de Pinto explained that he considered the increasing misery and crime amongst his fellow Jews the result of economic exclusion of Jews (they were forbidden to sell clothes, gherkins or fish on the street). The financial situation of the Portuguese-Jewish community wasn't very good and De Pinto feared that the Portuguese Jews could await the same fate as their Ashkenazic coreligionists. To resolve this issue, De Pinto proposed the emigration of poor Jews to overseas territories and the creation of a separate capital fund to support this plan. Both proposals were accepted by De Pinto's co-directors, but the execution of the plans wasn't very successful.
In 1750 De Pinto arranged for the conversion of the national debt from a 4 to a 3% basis.
Isaac de Pinto installed a small synagogue on an island on the Tulpenburg estate, but when his father died there were problems with the inheritance, and his brother Aron became the owner of Tulpenburg. Aron sold the place in 1761 and it was demolished in 1784.
Isaac de Pinto was a man of broad learning, but did not begin to write until nearly fifty, when he acquired a reputation by defending his co-religionists against Voltaire. In 1762 he published his Essai sur le Luxe at Amsterdam. In the same year appeared his Apologie pour la Nation Juive, ou Réflexions Critiques. The author sent a manuscript copy of this work to Voltaire, who thanked him.
Nowhere is this tension between eighteenth-century cultural exclusiveness and idealistic universalism more sharply illustrated than in the epistolary exchange of 1762 between Voltaire, the philosophe most notoriously hostile to Judaism, and Isaac de Pinto, the Amsterdam Sephardic writer and patrician. De Pinto's struggle to gain recognition as a philosophe in his own right underscores the exclusionary attitudes toward Jews that endured at the heart of Enlightenment culture. His personal negotiation of the complicated relationships between his Jewishness, his political and economic interests, and his cultural and intellectual aspirations also offers a valuable insight into the precariousness of Jewish identity at the threshold of secular modernity. De Pinto's Jewishness repeatedly marked him apart in the minds of those from whom he sought to gain acceptance as an equal. However, his status as a member of a transnational minority also inflected his intellectual relationship to the values of the Enlightenment. De Pinto's intense commitment to a transnational cosmopolitanism carried a very different weight than did the superficially similar invocations of internationalist rhetoric by non-Jewish intellectuals whose interests and identities were securely identified with either of the rival nation-states of Britain or France.
Antoine Guenée reproduced the Apologie at the head of his Lettres de Quelques Juifs Portugais, Allemands et Polonais, à M. de Voltaire.
In 1763 De Pinto became bankrupt as a result of speculation; he had to sell his house on Nieuwe Herengracht in Amsterdam with five famous fixed wall-paintings by Jan Weenix. But soon his financial situation recovered, and De Pinto moved to another fine mansion in The Hague; he and his family were invited to the palace when Mozart and his sister played. In 1768, De Pinto sent a letter to Denis Diderot on Du Jeu de Cartes. His Traité de la Circulation et du Crédit appeared in Amsterdam in 1771, and was twice reprinted, besides being translated into English and German. His Précis des Arguments Contre les Matérialistes was published at The Hague in 1774. Pinto's works were published in French (Amsterdam, 1777) and also in German (Leipzig, 1777).

Under the government of William V the country was troubled by internal dissensions; the Jews, however, remained loyal to him. As he entered the legislature on the day of his majority, March 8, 1766, everywhere in the synagogues services of thanks-giving were held. William V did not forget his Jewish subjects. On June 3, 1768, he visited both the German and the Portuguese synagogue; he attended the marriage of various prominent Jewish families.

Ashkenazim
Many Ashkenazim (so-called "German Jews") were also attracted to the newly independent Dutch provinces, especially near the end of the 17th century. However, the majority were displaced migrants escaping persecution in other parts of northern Europe, in particular the violence of the Thirty Year War (1618-1648) and the Chmielnicki Uprising in Poland in 1648. Because most of the immigrants were poor, they were less welcome. Their arrival in considerable number threatened the economic status of Amsterdam in particular, and with few exceptions they were turned away. Generally, they settled in rural areas where they subsisted typically as pedlars and hawkers. The result was that a large number of small Jewish communities existed throughout the Dutch provinces.
Over time, many of these German Jews attained prosperity through retail trading and by diamond-cutting, in which latter industry they retained the monopoly until about 1870.

The French Revolution and Napoleon
The year 1795 brought the results of the French Revolution to Holland, including emancipation for the Jews. The National Convention, on September 2, 1796, proclaimed this resolution: "No Jew shall be excluded from rights or advantages which are associated with citizenship in the Batavian Republic, and which he may desire to enjoy." Moses Moresco was appointed member of the municipality at Amsterdam; Moses Asser member of the court of justice there. The old conservatives, at whose head stood the chief rabbi Jacob Moses Löwenstamm, were not desirous of emancipation rights. Indeed, these rights were for the greater part of doubtful advantage; their culture was not so far advanced that they could frequent ordinary society; besides, this emancipation was offered to them by a party which had expelled their beloved Prince of Orange, to whose house they remained so faithful that the chief rabbi at The Hague, Saruco, was called the "Orange dominie"; the men of the old régime were even called "Orange cattle." Nevertheless, the Revolution appreciably ameliorated the condition of the Jews; in 1799 their congregations received, like the Christian congregations, grants from the treasury. In 1798 Jonas Daniel Meijer interceded with the French minister of foreign affairs in behalf of the Jews of Germany; and on Aug. 22, 1802, the Dutch ambassador, Schimmelpenninck, delivered a note on the same subject to the French minister.
From 1806 to 1810 Holland was ruled by , whose intention it was to so amend the condition of the Jews that their newly acquired rights would become of real value to them; the shortness of his reign, however, prevented him from carrying out his plans. For example, after having changed the market-day in some cities (Utrecht and Rotterdam) from Saturday to Monday, he abolished the use of the "Oath More Judaico" in the courts of justice, and administered the same formula to both Christians and Jews. To accustom the latter to military services he formed two battalions of 803 men and 60 officers, all Jews, who had been until then excluded from military service, even from the town guard.
The union of Ashkenazim and Sephardim intended by Louis Napoleon did not come about. He had desired to establish schools for Jewish children, who were excluded from the public schools; even the Maatschappij tot Nut van 't Algemeen, founded in 1784, did not willingly receive them or admit Jews as members. Among the distinguished Jews of this period were Meier Littwald Lehemon, Asser, Capadose, and the physicians Heilbron, Davids (who introduced vaccination), Stein van Laun (tellurium), and many others.


19th century and early 20th century
On November 30, 1813, William VI arrived at Scheveningen, and on December 11 he was solemnly crowned as King William I. Chief Rabbi Lehmans of The Hague organized a special thanksgiving service and implored God's protection for the allied armies on January 5, 1814. Many Jews fought at Waterloo, where thirty-five Jewish officers died. William VI occupied himself with the organization of the Jewish congregations. On February 26, 1814, a law was promulgated abolishing the French régime. The Jews continued to prosper in the independent Holland throughout the 19th century. By 1900, Amsterdam had 51,000 Jews with 12,500 paupers, The Hague 5,754 Jews with 846, Rotterdam 10,000 with 1,750, Groningen 2,400 with 613, Arnhem 1,224 with 349 ("Joodsche Courant," 1903, No. 44). The total population of the Netherlands in 1900 was 5,104,137, about 2% of whom were Jews.
The Netherlands and Amsterdam in particular remained a major Jewish population centre until World War II. The latter part of the 19th century, as well as the first decades of the 20th century, saw an ever-expanding Jewish community in Amsterdam after Jews from the mediene (the "country" Jews, Jews who were living outside the big cities - like Amsterdam, Rotterdam and The Hague -, across numerous small congregations throughout the Dutch countryside) left their communities en masse, searching for a "better life" in the larger cities.
Dutch Jews were staunch supporters of the Dutch monarchy until the late 19th century. Most Jews became socialists during the early 20th century and were fully integrated into the socialist pillar before the Holocaust.

Aaron Adolf de Pinto (The Hague, October 24, 1828 - Leyden, December 23, 1907) was a Dutch lawyer and Vice-President of the Supreme Court. Pinto was the editor of the explanatory text of the Code of Civil Procedure, which was published in 1865. He edited the second revised edition of the books of his brother (the State Attorney Abraham Pinto) Judicial Organization and Criminal Procedure, and wrote the revision of the Introduction to the Code of Criminal Procedure (1886). He also wrote (in response to abuse of people in prison) Questionable Reactions in Criminal Matters (1886). He also wrote articles for the Journal of Criminal Law, and the Acts of the Dutch Lawyers Association (De Pinto was a founding member of this magazine).
Pinto was the editor-in-chief of the Weekly for the Law (which was founded by his brother, Abraham de Pinto). He actively interfered with the Dreyfus affair, was a member of the Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences and the Utrecht Provincial Society. He was knighted in the Order of the Dutch Lion and Officer of the Crown of Italy. In 1907 he opened the eighth Zionist Congress.

Orthodox Jews in Amsterdam, 1910

The number of Jews in the Netherlands grew substantially from the early 19th century up to World War II. Between 1830 and 1930, the Jewish presence in the Netherlands increased by almost 250%.

The Holocaust

In 1939 there were some 140,000 Dutch Jews living in the Netherlands, among them some 25,000 German-Jewish refugees who had fled Germany in the 1930s (other sources claim that some 34,000 Jewish refugees entered the Netherlands between 1933 and 1940, mostly from Germany and Austria). The Nazi occupation force put the number of (racially) Dutch Jews in 1941 at some 154,000. In the Nazi census, some 121,000 persons declared they were members of the (Ashkenazi) Dutch-Israelite community; 4,300 persons declared they were members of the (Sephardic) Portuguese-Israelite community.



12 February 1941. In the Jewish quarter in Amsterdam there were violent clashes between Jews – sometimes supported by non-Jewish sympathisers – and members of the Weerbaarheidsafdeling of the N.S.B. (WA). The morning after the clashes on Waterlooplein, the Jewish quarter of Amsterdam was hermetically sealed. A blockade was erected at the Magere Brug (Skinny Bridge) across the Amstel river.

Some 19,000 persons reported having two Jewish grandparents (although it is generally believed a proportion of this number had in fact three Jewish grandparents, but declined to state that number in the fear they would be seen as Jews instead of half-Jews by the Nazi authorities). Some 6,000 persons reported having one Jewish grandparent. Some 2,500 persons counted in the census as Jewish were part of a Christian church (mostly Dutch Reformed, Calvinist Reformed or Roman Catholic).

Anne Frank, Montessori School Amsterdam

In 1941, the majority of Dutch Jews were living in Amsterdam. The census in 1941 gives an indication of the geographical spread of Dutch Jews at the beginning of the Second World War. In 1945 only about 35,000 of them were still alive. The exact number of "full Jews" who survived the Holocaust is estimated to be 34,379 (of whom 8,500 were part of a mixed marriage and thus spared from deportation and possible death in the concentration camps); the number of "half Jews" who were present in the Netherlands at the end of the Second World War in 1945 is estimated to be 14,545, the number of "quarter Jews" 5,990. Some 75% of the Dutch-Jewish population perished. Factors that influenced the great number of people perished were the fact that the Netherlands was not under a military regime, because the queen fled to England, and a shortage of hiding places. The Netherlands is a dense populated country, so there was less opportunity to survive in forests or other natural hidingplaces, for example.
During the first year of the occupation of the Netherlands, Jews were forced to register with the authorities and were banned from certain occupations. Starting in January, 1942, some Dutch Jews were forced to move to Amsterdam; others were directly deported to Westerbork, a concentration camp near the small village of Hooghalen which had been founded in 1939 by the Dutch government to give shelter to Jews fleeing Nazi persecution, but would fulfill the function of transit camp to the Nazi destruction camps in Middle and Eastern Europe during World War II.
All non-Dutch Jews were also sent to Westerbork. Additionally, over 15,000 Jews were sent to labour camps. Deportations of Jews from the Netherlands to Poland and Germany began at June 15 of 1942 and ended at September 13 1944. Ultimately some 101,000 Jews were deported in 98 transports from Westerbork to Auschwitz (57,800; 65 transports), Sobibor (34,313; 19 transports), Bergen-Belsen (3,724; 8 transports) and Theresienstadt (4,466; 6 transports), where most of them were murdered. Another 6,000 Jews were deported from other locations (like Vught) in the Netherlands to concentration camps in Germany, Poland and Austria (like Mauthausen). Only 5,200 survived. The Dutch underground hid an estimated number of Jews of some 25,000-30,000; eventually, an estimated 16,500 Jews managed to survive the war by hiding. Some 7,000 to 8,000 survived by fleeing to countries like Spain, the United States and Switzerland, or by being married to non-Jews (which saved them from deportation and possible death). At the same time, unfortunately there was substantial collaboration from the Dutch population including the Amsterdam city administration, the Dutch municipal police, and Dutch railway workers who all helped to round up and deport Jews.
One of the best known Holocaust victims in the Netherlands is Anne Frank. Along with her sister, Margot Frank, she was killed by the Nazis in March 1945 in the concentration camp Bergen-Belsen. Anne Frank's mother, Edith Frank-Holländer, died in Auschwitz. Anne Frank's father, Otto Frank, survived the war. Dutch victims of the Holocaust include Etty Hillesum and Abraham Icek Tuschinski.
In contrast to many other countries where all aspects of Jewish communities and culture were eradicated during the Shoah, a remarkably large proportion of rabbinic records survived in Amsterdam, making the history of Dutch Jewry unusually well documented.

1945-1960
The Jewish-Dutch population after the Second World War is marked by certain significant changes: emigration; a low birth rate; and a high intermarriage rate. After the Second World War and the devastations which were caused by the Holocaust, thousands of surviving Jews migrated to Israel (still home to some 6,000 Dutch Jews) and the United States. In 1947, two years after the end of the Second World War in the Netherlands, the total number of Jews as counted in the population census was just 14,346 (down from a count of 154,887 by the German occupation force in 1941). Later, this number was adjusted by Jewish organisations to some 24,000 Jews living in the Netherlands in 1954 - nevertheless an enormous decrease compared to the number of Jews counted in 1941 - a number which was also disputed as the German occupation force counted Jews on basis of race, which meant that for example hundreds of Christians of Jewish heritage were also included in the Nazi census (according to Raul Hilberg in his book 'Perpetrators Victims Bystanders: the Jewish Catastrophe, 1933-1945', "the Netherlands ... [had] 1,572 Protestants [of Jewish heritage in 1943] ... There were also some 700 Catholic Jews living in the Netherlands [during the Nazi occupation] ...")

1960s and 1970s
The sixties and seventies of the 20th century saw a lowering birth rate among Dutch Jews, while intermarriage increased; was the intermarriage rate among Jewish males 41% and among Jewish women 28% in the period of 1945-1949, figures from the nineties saw an increase of intermarriage to some 52% of the total number of marriages among Jews. Among so-called father Jews, the intermarriage rate is as high as 80%. Some within the Jewish community try to counter this trend, creating possibilities for (single) Jews to come in contact with other (single) Jews, like the dating site Jingles, Jentl en Jewell. According to a research by the Joods Maatschappelijk Werk (Jewish Social Service), a large number of Dutch Jews has received an academic education, and more Jewish Dutch women are in the labour force compared to non-Jewish Dutch women.

1980s and onwards
The Jewish population in the Netherlands became more internationalized, with an influx of mostly Israeli and Russian Jews during the last decades. Approximately one in three Dutch Jews has a non-Dutch background. The number of Jews living in the Netherlands (concentrated in Amsterdam) runs in the thousands (estimates run from 5,000 to 7,000 Israeli immigrants in the Netherlands, although some claims go as high as 12,000 ), although only a relatively small number of these Israeli Jews is connected to one of the religious Jewish institutions in the Netherlands. Some 10,000 Dutch Jews have emigrated to Israel in the last couple of decades.
At present, there are approximately 41,000 to 45,000 people in the Netherlands who are either Jewish as defined by halakha (Rabbinic law), defined as having a Jewish mother (70% - approximately 30,000 persons) or who have a Jewish father (30% - some 10,000 - 15,000 persons; their number was estimated at 12,470 in April 2006). Most Dutch Jews live in the major cities in the west of the Netherlands (Amsterdam, Rotterdam, The Hague, Utrecht); some 44% of all Dutch Jews live in Amsterdam, which is considered the centre of Jewish life in the Netherlands. In 2000, 20% of the Jewish-Dutch population was 65 years or older; birth rates among Jews were low. An exception is the growing Orthodox Jewish population, especially in Amsterdam.
There are currently some 150 synagogues present in the Netherlands, of which some 50 are still used for religious services. Large Jewish communities in the Netherlands are found in Amsterdam, Rotterdam and The Hague; smaller ones are found throughout the country.

Education
There are three Jewish schools present in the Netherlands, all located in Amsterdam. They are all affiliated to the Nederlands Israëlitisch Kerkgenootschap. Rosj Pina is a school for Jewish children in the age of 4 through 12. Education is mixed (boys and girls together) despite its affiliation to the Orthodox NIK. It is the largest Jewish school in the Netherlands. As of 2007 it has 285 pupils enrolled. Maimonides is the largest Jewish high school in the Netherlands. It had some 160 pupils enrolled in 2005. Although founded as a Jewish school and also affiliated to the NIK, it has a secular curriculum. Cheider presents education to Jewish children of all ages, and is the only one of three schools which holds an ultra-Orthodox (Haredi) background.Girls and boys are given separate education in separate classes. The school has some 200 pupils.

Jewish health care
There are two Jewish nursing homes in the Netherlands. One, Beth Shalom, is situated in Amsterdam at two locations, Amsterdam Buitenveldert and Amsterdam Osdorp. There are some 350 elderly Jews currently residing in Beth Shalom. Another Jewish nursing home, the Mr. L.E. Visserhuis, is located in The Hague. It is home to some 50 elderly Jews. Both nursing homes are aligned to Orthodox Judaism; kosher food is available. Both nursing homes have their own synagogue.
There is a Jewish wing at the Amstelland Hospital in Amstelveen. It is unique in Western Europe in that Jewish patients are cared with according to Orthodox Jewish law; kosher food is the only type of food available at the hospital . The Jewish wing was founded after the fusion of the Nicolaas Tulp Hospital and the (Jewish) Central Israelite Patient Care in 1978.
The Sinai Centrum (Sinai Center) is a Jewish psychiatric hospital located in Amsterdam, Amersfoort (primary location) and Amstelveen, which focuses on mental healthcare, as well as caring for and guiding persons who are mentally disabled. It is the only Jewish psychiatric hospital currently operating in Europe. Originally focusing on the Jewish segment of the Dutch population, and especially on Holocaust survivors who were faced with mental problems after the Second World War, nowadays the Sinai Centrum also provides care for non-Jewish victims of war and genocide.

Jewish media
Jewish television and radio in the Netherlands is produced by NIKMedia. Part of NIKMedia is the Joodse Omroep, which broadcasts documentaries, stories and interviews on a variety of Jewish topics every Sunday and Monday on the television channel (except from the end of May until the beginning of September). NIKMedia is also responsible for broadcasting music and interviews on Radio 5.
The Nieuw Israëlitisch Weekblad is the oldest still functioning (Jewish) weekly in the Netherlands, with some 6,000 subscribers. It is an important news source for many Dutch Jews, focusing on Jewish topics on a national as well as on an international level. The Joods Journaal (Jewish Weekly) was founded in 1997 and is seen as a more "glossy" magazine in comparison to the NIW. It gives a lot of attention to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Another Jewish magazine published in the Netherlands is the Hakehillot Magazine, issued by the NIK, the Jewish Community of Amsterdam and the PIK. Serving a more liberal Jewish audience, the NVPJ publishes its own magazine, Levend Joods Geloof (Living Jewish Faith), six times a year; serving this same audience, Beit Ha'Chidush publishes its own magazine as well, called Chidushim.
There are a couple of Jewish websites focusing on bringing Jewish news to the Dutch Jewish community. By far the most prominent is Joods.nl, which gives attention to the large Jewish communities in the Netherlands as well as to the Mediene, to Israel as well as to Jewish culture and youth.

Amsterdam
Amsterdam's Jewish community today numbers about 15,000 people. A large amount lives in the neighbourhoods of Buitenveldert, Oud-Zuid and the Rivierenbuurt. Buitenveldert is considered a popular neighbourhood to live in; this is due to its low crime-rate and because it is considered to be a quiet neighbourhood.
Especially in the neighbourhood of Buitenveldert there's a sizeable Jewish community. In this area, kosher food is widely available. There are several kosher restaurants, two bakeries, Jewish-Israeli shops, a pizzeria and some supermarkets host a kosher department. This neighourbood also has a Jewish elderly home, an Orthodox synagogue and three Jewish schools.

Cultural distinctions
Uniquely in The Netherlands, Ashkenazi and Sephardi communities coexisted in close proximity. Having different cultural traditions, the communities remained generally separate but their geographical closeness resulted in cross-cultural influences not found elsewhere. Notably, in the early days when small groups of Jews were attempting to establish communities, they were bound to use the services of rabbis and other officials from either culture, depending on who was available.
The close proximity of the two cultures inevitably led to intermarriage at a higher rate than was known elsewhere, and in consequence many Jews of Dutch descent have family names that seem to belie their religious affiliation. Particularly unusual, all Dutch Jews have for centuries named children after the children’s grandparents, which is otherwise considered exclusively a Sephardi tradition. (Ashkenazim elsewhere traditionally avoid naming a child after a living relative.)
In 1812, while The Netherlands was under Napoleonic rule, all Dutch residents (including Jews) were obliged to register surnames with the civic authorities, a practice which among Jews had previously been followed only by Sephardim. As a result of the compulsory registration and other extant records, it became clear that while the Ashkenazim had been avoiding civic registration, many had nevertheless been using an unofficial system of surnames for hundreds of years.
Also under Napoleonic rule, in 1809 a law was passed obliging Dutch Jewish schools to teach in Dutch and Hebrew. This effected the exclusion of other languages and in due course, Yiddish, the lingua franca of Ashkenazim, and Portuguese, the previous language of the Sephardim, practically ceased to be spoken among Dutch Jews. Certain Yiddish words have been adopted into the Dutch language, especially in Amsterdam (which is also called Mokum, from the Hebrew word for town or place, makom), where the historically large Jewish community has had a significant influence on the local dialect. There are several other Hebrew words that can be found in the local dialect including Mazel, which is the Hebrew word for luck or fortune,Tof which is Tov in Hebrew meaning good (as in Mazel tov), and Googem, in Hebrew Chacham, meaning wise, sly, witty or intelligent, where the Dutch g is pronounced similarly to the 8th letter of the Hebrew Alphabet the guttural Chet.

Economic influences
Jews played a major role in the development of Dutch colonial territories and international trade, and many Jews in former colonies have Dutch ancestry. However, all the major colonial powers were competing fiercely for control of trade routes; the Dutch were relatively unsuccessful and during the 18th century, their economy went into decline. Many of the Ashkenazim in the rural areas were no longer able to subsist and they migrated to the cities in search of work. This caused a large number of small Jewish communities to collapse completely (ten adult males were required for major religious ceremonies). Entire communities then migrated to the cities where the Jewish populations swelled explosively. In 1700, the Jewish population of Amsterdam was 6,200, with Ashkenazim and Sephardim in almost equal numbers. By 1795 the figure was 20,335, the vast majority being poor Ashkenazim.
Because Jews were obliged to live in specified Jewish quarters, there was severe overcrowding. By the mid-nineteenth century, many were migrating to other countries where the advancement of emancipation offered better opportunities

Haredi Jew on bicycle in Antwerp

History of the Jews in Belgium

The Kingdom of Belgium exists since the Belgian Revolution of 1830. Before that, it was part of The Netherlands, so until that time the history of the Belgian Jews is the same as that of the Dutch Jews (see above).

Early history
The first Jews to arrive in the present-day territory of Belgium arrived with the between the years 50 and 60 AD. Jews were mentioned as early as 1200 in Brabant (and in 1261, Duke Henry III ordered the expulsion of Jews and usurers from the province). The Jewish community suffered further during the Crusades, as many Jews who refused to be baptised were put to death. This early community mostly disappeared after the Black Death.

Sephardim
In the sixteenth century, many who had been expelled from Spain settled in Belgium and the Netherlands. In addition, many (crypto-Jews who outwardly professed Christianity) settled in Antwerp at the end of the fifteenth century.

Later history
After 1713, Austrian rule in Belgium promoted a more open Jewish society, and there was some immigration. The status of Jews in Belgium would improve under French and Dutch rule as well.

The Holocaust
Just before the Second World War, the Jewish community of Belgium was at its peak of roughly 100,000 Jews (with concentrations of 55,000 in Antwerp and 35,000 in Brussels). Some 20,000 of this number were German Jewish refugees. Belgium was occupied by Nazi Germany between May 1940 and September 1944, and anti-Semitic policies were adopted throughout Belgium, even though popular resistance in some cities hindered their full application. Many Belgian Jews were taken to concentration camps, primarily Auschwitz. The Committee for Jewish Defence, which worked with the national resistance movement, was the largest Jewish defense movement in Belgium during the war. All told, some 25,000 Belgian Jews perished between 1942 and 1945. Belgium was the only occupied country in which a transport (Train XX) was halted to give deportees a chance to escape.

Today
Today, there are around 42,000 Jews in Belgium. The Jewish Community of Antwerp is one of the largest in Europe, and one of the last places in the world where Yiddish is the primary language of a large Jewish community (mirroring certain Orthodox and Hassidic communities in New York and Israel). In addition a very high percentage (95%) of Jewish children in Antwerp receive a Jewish education. There are five Jewish newspapers and more than 45 active synagogues (30 of which are in Antwerp), in the country.

Jewish community of Antwerp
The Jewish community of Antwerp consists of around 20,000 Jews. The majority of those who choose to identify themselves as Jewish belong to the traditional or orthodox streams, although levels of practice vary. The charedi, or Orthodox Jews, tend to live, concentrated, in the city center in an area close to the Antwerp Central railway station. This area is also sometimes known as "Jewish Antwerp". Its main attraction is its close proximity to the diamond bourse, where in earlier days a large part of the community worked. It is also where the Jewish schools, kosher food outlets and general Jewish amenities are located.

Historically
The first Jewish presence in Antwerp is attested to by the will of Henry III, the Duke of Brabant and Margrave of Antwerp who in 1261 expressed his wish that the Jews of Brabant should be expelled and destroyed because they are all "usurers".
In the mid 14th century, John III, the Duke of Brabant, conducted a massive anti-Jewish campaign in Brussels and Leuven and drove them from the city.
A new group of Jewish immigrants started to settle in Antwerp in the early 16th century, when the city became a relatively safe haven for crypto-Jews fleeing the persecutions and the expulsions in the Iberian Peninsula. An often tenuous presence was maintained for the next century and a half, although Jews were not allowed to acquire citizenship and persecution was common.
It was not until 1794 and with the arrival of the French revolution that Jews could settle freely in Antwerp for the first time. The current Jewish community of Antwerp was officially established in 1816, when there were about one hundred Jews living in the city. This, the first legally recognized community, was known as the Jewish Community (Communauté Israelite). The first Jewish public prayers were held in the private home of Moise Kreyn, having received the approval of the city authorities. The Jews of Antwerp acquired possession of a cemetery in 1828. There were 151 Jews living in Antwerp in 1829.
During the Second World War, 65% of the city Jews perished in the Holocaust (vs. 35% only of Brussels Jews). On April 14 1941, the so-called "Antwerp Pogrom" occurred when some 200 Flemish Nazi supporters burned two synagogues in the Oosten straat. In May-September 1942, some 1500 Jewish men from Antwerp were taken into forced labour in Northern France, building the "Atlantic Wall" for the Todt organisation. From end July till November 1942, on three different occasions, razzia's were made by the German in Antwerp with the full collaboration of the local police. From a community of around 35000 Jews in Antwerp before the war, some 15000 remained in the city after 1945.

Today
In recent years many of the younger generation of secular Jews have moved away from the crowded city center. There has also been small but steady growth of Orthodox satellite communities in suburbs such as Edegem, Wilrijk and Brasschaat. This may cause the Antwerp community to seem overwhelmingly Haredi to the casual observer. After New York, London and Paris, Antwerp is one of the largest communities of Haredi Jews outside Israel.
The religious community is represented by two religious councils, known as kehillas:

• The Israëlitische Gemeente van Antwerpen Shomre Hadass; primarily oriented towards the Modern Orthodox community. It is led by Chief Rabbi David Moshe Lieberman. This council also espouses the values of religious Zionism, and maintains a pro-Israel stance in community affairs.
• The Orthodoxe Israëlitische Gemeente Machsike Hadass, represents the ultra-orthodox Haredi community.

The late Rabbi Chaim Kreiswirth, was the Chief Rabbi of the Machzikei Hadass kehilla for many years and was widely considered to be one of Jewish Antwerp's most charismatic figures. He died in 2003, to be replaced by Rabbi Rubinstein of Israel who died a few months after being nominated to the post.
An essential difference between these two organizations is apparent in the Shomrei Hadas' alignment with religious Zionist doctrine which the Machzikei Hadass rejects.