If you go through it Jewish Museum in Amsterdam, attracts almost 100 years Jewish history in photos pass you by. With the exhibition ‘Every picture tells a story’, the museum see part of her extensive photo collection.
Culture Club – NH News
The Amsterdam Jewish quarter before the war, the persecution during the war and the reconstruction afterwards. The exhibition shows a cross-section of the Jewish community, its culture and Jewish history in the Netherlands.
Picking up life after the war
“Food is typically Jewish”, curator Bernadette van Woerkom laughs at a photo of a bagel. Every aspect of Jewish life is covered in the exhibition. From religion to club life to sandwich shop Sal Meijer, a household name in Jewish Amsterdam for many years. “We have company photos from companies, old postcards, but also a lot of professional photographers. And we mainly show them. Like these photos by Annemie Wolff.”
Van Woerkom points to a number of black-and-white portraits that were made during the war: “Wolff lived in the Rivierenbuurt in Amsterdam and many Jewish neighbors allowed themselves to be photographed by her for their (false) identity cards, but the photo was often intended as memorial for people who were deported.”
The photos from the war are moving, but they are certainly not the only photos in the exhibition. A very large part of the exhibition is about life after the war, during the reconstruction. “They show how the small group of Jewish survivors picked up life again. Until today, now that there is a thriving Jewish community in the Netherlands again.”
A piece of history in pictures
Conservator van Woerkom is proud of the collection of photos: “In this way we can visualize a part of history.” She also hopes to teach the visitor something: “The more you know about each other, the more tolerant you are towards each other.”
Also in Culture Club a report about artist Nynke Koster. She makes rubber castings of art, ornaments and tombstones in the Grote Kerk in Alkmaar. During her studies at art school, a copy of the famous doors of a baptistery, De Porte del Paradiso, was found behind a wall in the Duomo of Florence. Nynke made a cast of it and turned it into a floor ornament. “From that moment on, I started casting off places that were dear to me,” she says as she pours a colored substance over the centuries-old floor in the Grote Kerk in Alkmaar.
Secret of the blacksmith
Music is played and infrared lamps heat the part of the church where Nynke is busy. There are dozens of jars on the floor with which her assistants make colored mixtures. Nynke then spreads the sticky substance over the decorated woodwork of a pulpit. It looks like it will never come off. But fortunately that is not the case.
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“I’m often asked if I can’t supply a jar of my rubber, but of course I don’t. The mixture is the blacksmith’s secret,” she laughs. “It also took me years to get it that way. In the beginning it stuck quite a bit.” She demonstrates how the rubber comes off once it has dried. Centuries of ingrained ruts and dirt become visible. The gravestones on the floor and the wooden walls are left spotless.
The casts are ultimately intended for a large work of art that can be seen, smelled and felt in the Grote Kerk in Alkmaar this summer. The exhibition New Light can be seen from 9 July in the Grote Kerk in Alkmaar.
Culture Club at NH Nieuws
In the new Culture Club programme, NH Nieuws visits culture makers from our province to ask them about their motivations. All episodes of Culture Club can be viewed on this one special page.