Jewish Museum: Four Synagogues in One
Why is it significant?
Take in the long brick front on the corner, the round-arched windows, the different rooflines pressed together. It looks like one large building, but it is really four synagogues, built one beside the other over eighty years, and today they hold the Jewish Museum.
Key Facts
| Place | Jewish Museum: Four Synagogues in One |
|---|---|
| Address | Nieuwe Amstelstraat 1, 1011 PL Amsterdam, Netherlands |
| Geo Coordinates | 52.36710, 4.90380 |
| Part of Walk | Mokum's Lost Quarter: The Jewish Heart of Amsterdam and the Plantage |
| Generated | Generated |
Take in the long brick front on the corner, the round-arched windows, the different rooflines pressed together. It looks like one large building, but it is really four synagogues, built one beside the other over eighty years, and today they hold the Jewish Museum.
They belonged to the Ashkenazim, the Jews who came to Amsterdam from Germany, Poland and further east. They arrived later than the Portuguese, mostly poor, speaking Yiddish, and for a long time the wealthy Sephardim kept a polite distance from them. But they grew in numbers until they far outnumbered the Portuguese, and in 1671 they opened their Great Synagogue, the Grote Sjoel, designed by the same architect who would soon build the Portuguese one across the square. Rivals, neighbours, and sharing a builder.
The community kept growing, so they kept building: the Obbene Sjoel, the upstairs synagogue, in 1686, the Dritt Sjoel, the third synagogue, in 1700, and the New Synagogue in 1752, with its great dome. Inside the Great Synagogue you can still see the ritual bath, the mikveh, discovered under the floor, and the marble ark where the Torah scrolls were kept.
During the occupation the synagogues were plundered and their community largely murdered. Before the war around eighty thousand Jews lived in Amsterdam, about one in ten of the city's people. Most of them were deported and killed. After the war the empty buildings decayed for decades, until they were restored and, in 1987, the Jewish Museum moved in, a museum founded in 1932 that had itself lost much of its collection to the occupiers.
Today the museum tells the story not as an ending, but as the life of a community, its festivals, kitchens, quarrels and jokes, which is the life the deportations tried to erase. Now walk south along the busy Weesperstraat, and look for a wall of red bricks and mirrored steel.