How Amstelveen became an important center of Jewish life
Not Amsterdam, but Amstelveen as a major Jewish community: over the course of roughly a century, Amsterdam’s smaller neighbour developed into a unique suburb with a distinctive Jewish history. Jewish Studies professor Bart Wallet has written a book about it.
Today, Amstelveen is the second-largest Jewish community in the Netherlands after Amsterdam. Although the Jewish community is relatively young—having emerged in the 1930s—it is regarded as one of the country’s most significant Jewish communities and one with a uniquely distinctive history.
It was time for Amstelveen to step out of Amsterdam’s shadow, according to Bart Wallet, professor of Early Modern and Modern Jewish History. He has written Hoop en wanhoop (Hope and Despair), a Jewish urban biography of Amstelveen.
A suburb
Why Amstelveen? “I found the idea of a suburb very interesting,” says Wallet. “A very young Jewish community in Amstelveen that has rapidly grown into one of the largest Jewish communities in the country.” Whereas Jewish communities had existed in Amsterdam since the seventeenth century, a Jewish presence in Amstelveen only began to emerge in the late 1930s. Many Jewish Amsterdammers from the upper middle class moved to what was then called Nieuwer-Amstel, seeking a suburban commuter lifestyle. Similar developments took place in cities such as London and New York City, where Jewish suburban communities were also forming during this period.
At first, however, there was no real Jewish “community” in Amstelveen. According to Wallet, there were “individual Jews of all kinds of backgrounds and outlooks,” who were more secular than average. Those who attended synagogue generally travelled to Amsterdam, where Jewish schools and kosher shops were also located.
Jewish and non-Jewish residents of Amstelveen lived closely alongside one another, particularly in the newly developed commuter neighbourhoods. They met through education, sports, and social life, and mixed marriages were common. At the time, they could not have known that these social ties would later prove vital during the war.
German Jews
A more defined community emerged in 1938, when the first synagogue was inaugurated. According to Wallet, this development was partly driven by the arrival of German Jews fleeing the antisemitic policies of Adolf Hitler. “Before that, there were mainly Jewish individuals living in Amstelveen. Because they were secular, they did not need to live close to a synagogue or other Jewish infrastructure.”What made Amstelveen unusual was the relationship between Dutch Jews and newly arrived German Jewish refugees.
“They genuinely worked together, which was not common at the time. It was a much more inclusive community than elsewhere, where you generally had to be Dutch to be accepted into the community.” Another distinctive feature of Amstelveen’s Jewish community, Wallet argues, was its strong emphasis not only on religion but also on Jewish culture. “Through art, culture, theatre, and education.”
Anyone writing a book that deals with the Holocaust risks, often unintentionally, telling the story from the perpetrators’ perspective. After all, many of the surviving sources from that period were produced by the perpetrators themselves. “Jews are often reduced to passive objects who are moved around by others,” explains Bart Wallet. He therefore advocates an approach based on the concept of Jewish agency, focusing on “how Jews themselves acted and responded to discrimination, exclusion, deportation, and genocide.”
With this in mind, Wallet traces what he calls the “routes to death” and the “routes to survival” taken by Jews from Amstelveen. Which strategies did people use to escape? How did these evolve over time? What steps did they take? The paths often lay remarkably close to one another. “Many of the Amstelveen Jews who were ultimately murdered attempted to follow the same routes to survival. However, they became victims of betrayal, went into hiding too late, or wanted to do so but lacked the necessary connections,” Wallet writes.
Survival
One such survival story is that of Justus Heijmans, which Wallet describes as “nothing short of spectacular.” Immediately after the Dutch capitulation in 1940, Heijmans – who held a pilot’s licence – travelled to Amsterdam Airport Schiphol. Almost all aircraft had already been disabled, except for one. The commanding officer, aware that Heijmans was Jewish, offered him the aircraft. At 3 a.m. – night flying being his speciality – Heijmans took off for United Kingdom, where he arrived safely.
Although similar escape routes existed elsewhere in the country, Amstelveen’s survival rate was exceptionally high. Of the 448 Jews living there, 251 survived the war – a survival rate of 56.6 per cent, compared with the national average of 29.6 per cent.
Several factors explain this. The location of Amstelveen played an important role—close to Schiphol Airport and IJmuiden—but just as crucial were its social connections with non-Jewish residents. Wallet describes successful hiding in Amstelveen as something that was often possible because Jewish residents knew someone within the local community. The relatively high number of mixed marriages also contributed significantly to the higher survival rate.
After the war
The book does not end in 1945, but instead shows how Amstelveen developed into a major Jewish community in the postwar years. As in the 1930s, Amstelveen experienced growth in the 1950s and 1960s. Because so many Jewish communities had been destroyed during the war, anyone seeking access to Jewish life and infrastructure often had to rely on Amsterdam. For many people from outside the city, however, that step was too large. “In Amstelveen, there was access to the Jewish infrastructure of Amsterdam, but you didn’t have to live in the big city,” Wallet explains.
In this way, Amstelveen once again grew into a full-fledged Jewish community from the ground up—through culture, theatre, music, dance, and education. It was low-threshold and accessible. That is why the synagogue, inaugurated in 1961, was deliberately not dedicated strictly as a synagogue, but as a “house,” where religion and culture stood side by side: equally important, leaving individuals free to choose their own path.
