voiceofreason
Senior News Editor since 2011
https://www.timesofisrael.com/evict...avaged-synagogue-brings-back-bitter-memories/
Eviction of Dutch Jews from Nazi-ravaged synagogue brings back bitter memories
Though some say it's simply a sad reality that Deventer's small community can't afford the building, local congregants see their removal as a delayed aftereffect of the Holocaust
By Cnaan Liphshiz
6 August 2018, 3:10 pm
DEVENTER, Netherlands (JTA) — Four years ago, Tom Furstenberg proudly carried into his synagogue its first Torah scroll since the Holocaust, when local Nazis destroyed the building’s interior.
The scroll’s introduction in 2014 was an important moment for the Beth Shoshana Masorti community that Furstenberg helped establish in 2010 in this city of nearly 100,000 residents, located 60 miles east of the capital Amsterdam.
After all, it was proof that Jewish life had finally returned to a place where it had been uprooted and destroyed.
“I felt that this was it, nothing could reverse our presence as part of this city,” Furstenberg, a 49-year-old teacher and chairman of Deventer’s Jewish community, told JTA on Monday.
Furstenberg had been overly optimistic.
On Monday, he and a dozen other members of their congregation of 35 had to take away the scroll and all the other ritual possessions and load them into a white van.
The building housing the Great Synagogue of Deventer was sold in January by the church that had owned it for decades. The developers, a Dutch-Turkish restaurant owner and his associate, then evicted the congregants amid a legal fight over the owners’ plan to turn the place into an eatery.
Eviction of Dutch Jews from Nazi-ravaged synagogue brings back bitter memories
Though some say it's simply a sad reality that Deventer's small community can't afford the building, local congregants see their removal as a delayed aftereffect of the Holocaust
By Cnaan Liphshiz
6 August 2018, 3:10 pm
DEVENTER, Netherlands (JTA) — Four years ago, Tom Furstenberg proudly carried into his synagogue its first Torah scroll since the Holocaust, when local Nazis destroyed the building’s interior.
The scroll’s introduction in 2014 was an important moment for the Beth Shoshana Masorti community that Furstenberg helped establish in 2010 in this city of nearly 100,000 residents, located 60 miles east of the capital Amsterdam.
After all, it was proof that Jewish life had finally returned to a place where it had been uprooted and destroyed.
“I felt that this was it, nothing could reverse our presence as part of this city,” Furstenberg, a 49-year-old teacher and chairman of Deventer’s Jewish community, told JTA on Monday.
Furstenberg had been overly optimistic.
On Monday, he and a dozen other members of their congregation of 35 had to take away the scroll and all the other ritual possessions and load them into a white van.
The building housing the Great Synagogue of Deventer was sold in January by the church that had owned it for decades. The developers, a Dutch-Turkish restaurant owner and his associate, then evicted the congregants amid a legal fight over the owners’ plan to turn the place into an eatery.