Amsterdam (Rough Guide) - Martin Dunford [58]
At the turn of the twentieth century, there were around 60,000 Jews living in Amsterdam, but refugees from Hitler’s Germany swelled this figure to around 120,000 in the 1930s. The disaster that befell this community during the German occupation is hard to conceive, but the bald facts speak for themselves; when Amsterdam was liberated, there were only 5000 Jews left and the Jodenhoek was, to all intents and purposes, a ghost town. At present, there are about 25,000 Jews resident in – and spread out across – the city, but while Jewish life in Amsterdam has survived, its heyday is gone forever.
The Old Jewish Quarter and Eastern docklands | The Old Jewish Quarter |
Waterlooplein
Jodenbreestraat runs just parallel to the Stadhuis en Muziektheater (town and concert hall), a sprawling complex whose indeterminate modernity dominates Waterlooplein, a rectangular parcel of land that was originally swampy marsh. This was the site of the first Jewish Quarter, but by the late nineteenth century it had become an insanitary slum, home to the poorest of the Ashkenazi Jews. The slums were cleared in the 1880s and thereafter the Waterlooplein and its open-air market became the centre of Jewish life in the city. During the war, the Germans used the square to round up their victims, but despite these ugly connotations the Waterlooplein was revived in the 1950s as the site of the city’s main flea market – and remains so to this day (Mon–Sat 9am–5pm), albeit on a much smaller scale. As far as the city council was concerned, the market’s reappearance was only a stopgap while they mulled over plans to entirely reinvent the depopulated Jodenhoek; for starters, whole streets were demolished to make way for the motorist – with Mr Visserplein, for example, becoming little more than a traffic intersection – and then, warming to their theme in the late 1970s, the council announced the building of the massive new Waterlooplein town and concert hall complex that stands today. Opposition was immediate and widespread as it was feared the end result would be an eyesore, but attempts to prevent the building failed, and the Muziektheater opened in 1986. Since then it has established an international reputation for the quality of its performances (see "Venues"). One of the story’s abiding ironies is that the title of the protest campaign – “Stopera” – has passed into common usage to describe the whole complex.
Inside the “Stopera”, amid all the jaded concrete, there are a couple of minor attractions, beginning with the glass columns in the glass-roofed public passageway towards the rear of the complex. These give a salutary lesson on the fragility of the Netherlands; two contain water indicating the sea levels in the Dutch towns of Vlissingen and IJmuiden (below knee level), while another records the levels recorded during the 1953 flood disaster (way above head height). Down the stairs, a display indicates what is known as “Normal Amsterdam Level” (NAP), originally calculated in 1684 as the average water level in the River IJ and still the basis for measuring altitude above sea level across Europe. Metres away, in the Muziektheater’s foyer, is a forceful and inventive memorial to the district’s Jews, in which a bronze violinist bursts through the floor tiles.
Outside, at the very tip of Waterlooplein, where the River Amstel meets the Zwanenburgwal canal, there is a second memorial – a black stone tribute to the dead of the Jewish resistance; the inscription from Jeremiah translates “If my eyes were a well of tears, I would cry day and night for the fallen fighters of my beloved people.” Metres away, a third sculpture honours Spinoza(see "Mozes en Aaron Kerk"), who looks suitably serene above an inscription that reads “The aim of the state is freedom”.
The Old Jewish Quarter and Eastern docklands | The Old Jewish Quarter | Waterlooplein |
Mr Visserplein
Mr Visserplein is a busy junction for traffic speeding towards the IJ tunnel. It takes its name from Lodewijk Ernst Visser