December 15, 2018

YouTubers show that being openly Jewish is a problem

Filed under: General,History by Orangemaster @ 4:59 pm

YouTube crew Bongenoten (‘Allies’) enjoy filming social experiments to see how people deal with extreme behaviour.

In the video below, YouTuber Benjamin Beernink decided to walk around parts of Utrecht with a yarmulke (aka kippah), the head cap Jewish men wear. Beernink happens to be Jewish, but does not usually wear a yarmulke. I can say that it is not something we see very often in the Netherlands.

The crew walked around different neighbourhoods (downtown, Ondiep and Kanaleneiland) in Utrecht. Some reactions were really intense, Beernink having been called ‘kankerjood’ (roughly, ‘Fucking Jew’, but then ‘kanker, which means ‘cancer’ is used as an adjectival swear word) in Kanaleneiland, which doesn’t have the best reputation. He was also laughed at inside a shop by staff and called a ‘faggot’ as well.

The reason Bondgenoten made the video was due to a poll presented by Dutch television show EenVandaag claiming that research shows that a large part of Jews don’t dare show they are Jewish and hide their faith.

(Link: rtvutrecht.nl)

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February 6, 2017

Unique Jewish Frisian wedding caught on film

Filed under: Film,History,Religion by Orangemaster @ 12:37 pm

A film of the only known footage of Frisian Jewish life from before the Holocaust is currently doing the rounds, and “comes amid a wave of popular interest in the Holocaust, including in films and series with record ratings and in the construction of monuments – most recently with the opening last year of the National Holocaust Museum in Amsterdam.”

This unique black-and-white, silent document from 1939 shows the wedding of a Frisian Jewish couple who escaped the genocide, and was shown on Frisian public broadcaster, Omrop Fryslân. In late January the film was placed on YouTube by the Frisian Film Archive. The film reel was discovered by the couple’s children in their late mother’s suitcase in 2008, but they needed all those years to process its content.

Just a year after filming, the people in the movie would come under the Nazi occupation that decimated the Frisian Jewish community, along with 75 percent of Dutch Jews — the highest death rate in occupied Western Europe.

The Dutch government’s policy of storing information about its citizens enabled the Nazis to efficiently murder as many Jews as possible. Against all odds, this couple survived. Watch images of the wedding of Barend Boers of Amsterdam and Mimi Dwinger from Leeuwarden, Friesland.

(Link: timesofisrael, Photo by Jacques Lahitte, some rights reserved)

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October 7, 2015

National holocaust monument becomes glass house

Filed under: Architecture,History by Orangemaster @ 6:38 pm

westerbork

The green and white wooden house is one of the last remaining buildings at Kamp Westerbork, a WWII Nazi transit camp in Hooghalen, Drenthe where Dutch Jews, Sinti and Romani stayed and were readied for transport to Nazi concentration camps elsewhere. German Jewess Anne Frank passed through there as well in her final months before being transported back to Germany. The house was declared a national monument in 1994.

Intended as a memorial to WWII, the large glass box creates a vitrine-like enclosure around the clapboard residence of SS commander Albert Konrad Gemmeker. According to Oving Architecten from Groningen, it will both preserve the structure and be used to host educational events.

(Link: www.dezeen.com, photo ovingarchitecten.nl)

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April 1, 2015

Anne Frank died earlier than recorded

Filed under: History by Orangemaster @ 3:23 pm
kastanjeboom

Anne Frank and her sister Margot probably died a month earlier than previously recorded at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. According to Erika Prins, a researcher at the Anne Frank House museum in Amsterdam, her death was placed in February instead of March. Both girls died of typhus, with most typhus deaths happening some 12 days after the first symptoms.

Anyone who knows the story of Anne Frank often has the feeling that if she had held on a bit longer, she could have been liberated, which was never really the case, but now even less so.

“The new date of her death changes little about the tragic lives of Anne and her sister Margot, who went into hiding with their family in an Amsterdam canal house but were eventually betrayed, sent to Nazi concentration camps and died in the Holocaust along with millions of other Jews.”

Jews hid in many places across the country (in Dutch). You can also see Anne Frank on YouTube in a film fragment, the only time ever apparently. As well, many people think Anne Frank was Dutch, but she was German.

(Links: phys.org, www.nu.nl, Photo of famous chestnut tree: annefranktree.com)

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April 19, 2014

“Amsterdam, give Holocaust survivors their money back!”, says NIOD

Filed under: History by Branko Collin @ 1:39 pm

museumplein-jcm718What should a city do when its citizens survive the death camps and arrive home to find all their possessions stolen, even their homes (where now Nazi collaborators live)?

With possible answers ranging from “give them a hero’s welcome” to “do everything in your power to restore normality” to “charge them back taxes for property they haven’t had the use of”, after World War II was over, the city of Amsterdam chose the latter.

Three years ago university student Charlotte van den Berg stumbled upon 342 cases of retroactive taxes for Holocaust victims in Amsterdam’s city archives where she worked part-time. Toby Sterling reports:

Van den Berg notified city officials about the documents and received assurances they would be fully investigated. Now and then she checked in, only to learn that nothing had been done. […] In desperation, she turned her findings over to Amsterdam newspaper Het Parool in March 2013.

There is a method that seems to be favoured by Dutch officials who wish to deal with the wrongs their predecessors committed long ago, whether they had assisted Nazis with persecuting Jews or killed civilians in the revolutionary Indonesian war, and that method is to let the passage of time finish what the evil-doers started.

Parool’s publication of Van den Berg’s findings in 2013 got the ball rolling though and the NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies started its own research. NIOD’s report is due later this month, but in the meantime details were leaked to the press. The institute will allegedly recommend that the city repay 400,000 euro in fines and 4.5 million euro in back taxes. That’s just for one very narrow category of taxes, “fees for long-term leases when the city owns the ground a house is built on”.

(Photo by Flickr user jcm718, some rights reserved. Here you see the Van Gogh Museum on Museumplein in Amsterdam. Currently a prime real estate location, Jewish owners of a house in this location had to sell the land because they couldn’t afford the costs involved in making the house liveable again and partly because of retroactive taxes, according to Nieuw Israëlitisch Weekblad)

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November 8, 2011

My name is Cohen at Jewish Historical Museum

Filed under: History,Photography by Orangemaster @ 12:46 pm
annefrankstatue1.jpg

Starting on 25 November 2011, Amsterdam’s Jewish Historical Museum will feature the exhibition ‘Mijn naam is Cohen’ (‘My name is Cohen’), a series of portraits made by Amsterdam photographer Daniel Cohen with texts by unrelated Editor-in-Chief of magazine Vrij Nederland, Mischa Cohen.

They got together and found 25 people with the same last name, but of different generations, backgrounds, gender, views, Jewish and non-Jewish. Former mayor and politician Job Cohen is mentioned as is journalist Jisca Cohen thanks in part to whom I got to meet Daniel Cohen (unrelated to each other) and found out about his project first hand. I also know he plays a good game of football.

The quick and dirty version is that Amsterdam (aka Mokum, its Jewish name still very much in use by everyone) had lots of Jews and today for Holocaust reasons has very few.

(The picture of Anne Frank, the most ‘popular’ Jewish figure of Amsterdam who was German and not Dutch.)

(Link: www.jhm.nl)

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June 10, 2009

Hate speech against Muslims, Jews and gays still high

Filed under: General by Branko Collin @ 9:52 am
hate

Meldpunt Discriminatie Internet, where you can report Internet occurrences of hate speech, has just published its year report for 2008 (PDF, Dutch). The amount of hate speech aimed at the dark-skinned, at Muslims, Jews and gays remains high. MDI counted 899 criminal utterances last year, down from 1078 utterances in 2007. Complaints about discriminatory utterances led to removal of the speech in 91% of the cases. MDI reported 7 instances of hate speech to the police last year.

(Via the print version of De Pers, Image: thesituationist)

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