Germany gives £3.4m to Dutch Holocaust museum’s renovation
The museum will close down for two years so it can be redone, and will be turned into a single site with a larger capacity
Germany has pledged nearly £3.4 million ($4.5 million) toward renovating the Dutch national Holocaust museum.
Emile Schrijver, director of Amsterdam’s Jewish Cultural Quarter, an organisation comprising five museums and institutions in the Dutch capital, announced the funding Monday.
“We expected a donation of half a million or a million euros,” Schrijver told Het Parool.
The National Holocaust Museum of the Netherlands opened in 2017 in a former religious seminary that was used to smuggle hundreds of Jewish children to safety from an adjacent building in which they were held. Their parents were interred across the street at the Hollandsche Schouwburg, a theatre that the Nazis converted into a detention facility.
In February, the museum will close down for two years for renovations meant to turn the theatre and seminary into a single museum with a larger capacity and state-of-the-art displays. The renovations will cost about £23m ($30 million). The Dutch government has allocated at least $6 million toward the project.
Nazi Germany and its Dutch collaborators murdered about 75 percent of the Netherlands’ pre-war Jewish population of approximately 140,000 Jews. It was the highest death rate in Nazi-Occupied Western Europe. Dutch Jewry’s numbers have remained at around 40,000 people since the Holocaust.
Thank you for helping to make Jewish News the leading source of news and opinion for the UK Jewish community. Today we're asking for your invaluable help to continue putting our community first in everything we do.
For as little as £5 a month you can help sustain the vital work we do in celebrating and standing up for Jewish life in Britain.
Jewish News holds our community together and keeps us connected. Like a synagogue, it’s where people turn to feel part of something bigger. It also proudly shows the rest of Britain the vibrancy and rich culture of modern Jewish life.
You can make a quick and easy one-off or monthly contribution of £5, £10, £20 or any other sum you’re comfortable with.
100% of your donation will help us continue celebrating our community, in all its dynamic diversity...
Engaging
Being a community platform means so much more than producing a newspaper and website. One of our proudest roles is media partnering with our invaluable charities to amplify the outstanding work they do to help us all.
Celebrating
There’s no shortage of oys in the world but Jewish News takes every opportunity to celebrate the joys too, through projects like Night of Heroes, 40 Under 40 and other compelling countdowns that make the community kvell with pride.
Pioneering
In the first collaboration between media outlets from different faiths, Jewish News worked with British Muslim TV and Church Times to produce a list of young activists leading the way on interfaith understanding.
Campaigning
Royal Mail issued a stamp honouring Holocaust hero Sir Nicholas Winton after a Jewish News campaign attracted more than 100,000 backers. Jewish Newsalso produces special editions of the paper highlighting pressing issues including mental health and Holocaust remembrance.
Easy access
In an age when news is readily accessible, Jewish News provides high-quality content free online and offline, removing any financial barriers to connecting people.
Voice of our community to wider society
The Jewish News team regularly appears on TV, radio and on the pages of the national press to comment on stories about the Jewish community. Easy access to the paper on the streets of London also means Jewish News provides an invaluable window into the community for the country at large.
We hope you agree all this is worth preserving.
