“Jewish death is so present in Amsterdam. There is absolutely nothing Jewish left in the Jewish neighborhood. No Jewish people live there anymore.”

Don’t tell anyone you are Jewish.
Don’t talk about it.
Don’t wear Jewish symbols.

For many of us claiming Jewishness has been hard, nearly impossible. How can we be Jewish if self-censoring is the only viable way to exist? When we are cut off from our culture and ancestral knowledge? At times we feel like people in the Netherlands see us as unicorns, mythical and mysterious beings that are pure and unsullied by reality, perfect in our victimhood. Or in a perfectly opposite twist, as the personification of pure evil.

For too long, we have been reduced to our violent deaths, reduced to a mere religion, reduced to our relation to Israel. We are so much more.

We are alive and refuse to be erased any further!

We refuse to have the story of our deaths, our mass-murder, overshadow our lives. We refuse to be tolerated in our presumed absence or talked about in the past tense. We are still here. Still alive. Still flesh and bones and blood and nerves.

We are alive

“When I talk about how my identity can feel unsafe in the Netherlands, people ask: Why don’t you go to Israel? Instead of: What makes you feel unsafe? What can I do about it?”

The ShoahIn Hebrew, Shoah means ‘catastrophe’. There are many words Jews and other persecuted groups use for what is commonly called the Holocaust. Yiddish speakers often use the term Ḥurban, which is also used for the destruction of the second temple and the expulsion from Jerusalem. The International Romani Union uses the term ‘samudaripen’, which means ‘mass killing’. Holocaust once meant a burnt sacrifice to a god. More still reverberates through our communities. But still we choose to make a life here.

The Shoah shattered our connections to ancestral memory. It interrupted our traditions and destroyed all manner of possible futures.

We hear our lost legacy singing loudly from the abyss.

We struggle to take ownership of our Jewishness–to return to community. We forget that being Jewish is just that: a practice. It can be as basic as brushing our teeth and something we learn like riding a bike.

There is no shame in learning to be Jewish, in making mistakes, in falling and even failing.

There is so much learning to be done and old ways to be discovered anew. It is okay to not know it all. We are still Jewish.

For some of us, it has taken a long while to be able to say the words: I am Jewish. For some of us, they are on the tips of our tongues. For others, they are buried somewhere deep inside ourselves. But when we finally accept our Jewishness, the question that follows is: now what?