We are Jews in the Netherlands, people from all over the world who found refuge here. Some of us made a home here last year and others have lived here for hundreds of years. We come bearing gifts of language, stories, food, and culture. We are the descendants of those who survived 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 and the Inquisition and all manners of violence, expulsions, and persecutions. You may recognize our legacy in the words you use, the food you eat, the occasional smattering of Hebrew letters carved into stone on the side of a building. You may stumble over the names of our ancestors and predecessors commemorated in sidewalk markers.
We were broken here: abducted and murdered, forced into hiding, whole families destroyed. We were robbed of our joy and our traditions. Those of us who survived the camps and the hiding had to battle with the tax authority, pay bills from the train service for the privilege of being transported to our murders, live next to those who betrayed us or stole from us. We witnessed the destruction of entire neighborhoods where we once lived, had our synagogues, schools, and libraries flattened in the name of modernity. We learned to be quiet, to doe maar normaal, because everybody suffered during the war, right? We learned to hide our Jewishness from our children, to warn them not to speak of it, to give them names so bland that no one would suspect they are Jewish.
We nearly forgot ourselves, nearly forgot our joy and our stories. The Shoah may not have murdered all of us, but it nearly succeeded in its goal of destroying our communities, cultures, and traditions, of erasing our existence.
Now we are remembering. Remembering the possibility of Jewish joy and of resistance against invisibility. We are the Jews who embrace contradictions and complexities. We embrace our messiness and the differences among us in a refutation of purity.
Now we are demanding our doykeitDoykeit (דאָיִקייט) means ‘hereness’ in Yiddish. What a word! It’s a reminder of the impact of Jewish socialist movements throughout Europe, which believed in our hereness, our place here in Europe, in solidarity among those most vulnerable. Mokum means place in Yiddish and Hebrew (makom מקום). In the Netherlands, Mokum also refers to Amsterdam. In fact, Mokum Alef refers to Amsterdam and Mokum Reish to Rotterdam. More, our mokum, our hereness. We want to create our Mokum in our makom. We claim rootedness in diaspora, dream of spaces of loving disagreement, of joy and exploration, of mistakes and growth. We demand the security to let our guard down and open gates that have long been closed.