Uilenburg: Diamonds and a Hidden Synagogue
Why is it significant?
Walk along the Nieuwe Uilenburgerstraat and you are on an island, although it hardly feels like one: water on both sides, brick warehouses, quiet modern housing. Uilenburg was dug out at the end of the sixteenth century for shipbuilders.
Key Facts
| Place | Uilenburg: Diamonds and a Hidden Synagogue |
|---|---|
| Address | Nieuwe Uilenburgerstraat 91, 1011 LM Amsterdam, Netherlands |
| Geo Coordinates | 52.37020, 4.90530 |
| Part of Walk | Mokum's Lost Quarter: The Jewish Heart of Amsterdam and the Plantage |
| Generated | Generated |
Walk along the Nieuwe Uilenburgerstraat and you are on an island, although it hardly feels like one: water on both sides, brick warehouses, quiet modern housing. Uilenburg was dug out at the end of the sixteenth century for shipbuilders. Within a few generations the shipyards had moved away, and the island filled with the poorest of Amsterdam's Jews.
Behind the houses on this street hides the Uilenburger Synagogue, built in 1766 for the Ashkenazi Jews of the island. You could pass a hundred times without noticing it, because it stands inside the block, as so many synagogues did, a house of prayer reached through a gateway rather than displayed to the street. It survived the war, was used for other purposes for decades, and has been restored.
What made Uilenburg famous, though, was diamonds. Amsterdam was one of the great diamond cities of the world, and the cutters and polishers were overwhelmingly Jewish, partly because the trade was one of the few crafts not closed to them by the old guilds. When vast diamond fields were discovered in South Africa from the late 1860s, the city enjoyed a frantic boom, the Cape Time, and factories with steam-driven polishing wheels rose right here on the island. One of them still stands down the street, built in 1879.
But the work was precarious, the wages swung with the market, and the island's alleys were notorious slums. In 1894 the diamond workers founded their own union under a young Jewish leader called Henri Polak, and it became one of the strongest in the country, winning shorter hours and paid holidays long before most trades. You will pass the street named after him later, in the Plantage.
In the early twentieth century much of Uilenburg was cleared as a slum, and the war emptied what was left of its Jewish life. Now walk south across the bridge towards the two great synagogues facing each other across a wide, busy square.