Cimitero Ebraico Beth Haim, North Holland Province, The Netherlands
4.0 (17 reviews) Spent 1-2 hours Ranking #3 in Amstelveen Historic Sites • Cemeteries • Religious Sites
An amazing tour.
This is *not* a show-up-and-walk-around place, please do not go there without letting them know you're coming. My wife arranged (weeks before) to see if she could find the graves of some ancestors, and we were met at the gate. The tour we were given was above and beyond any possible expectation. The history of this place, and these people, is captivating. If you have any interest in the history of the Portuguese Jews, consider contacting Beth Haim for a visit (also consider a donation to help with its upkeep).
Address
Kerkstraat 10, 1191 JB Ouderkerk aan de Amstel, Amstelveen The Netherlands
Mobile
Website
http://www.bethhaim.nl
Current local date and time now
Tuesday, May 14, 2024, 6:59
User Ratings
4.0 based on (17 reviews)
Reviews
-
5TedinAppleton 5:00 PM May 16, 2015
Serious Cemetery Viewing
This small Jewish cemetery was started in the early 1600's and boasts many famous people buried there including the parents of Spinoza and friends of Rembrandt and many more. The graves are typical of Sephardic Jews from Iberia, with Spanish and Portuguese names. The cemetery has a mix of richly carved marble grave stones (Lying flat) as well as older, weathered limestone. This place is in consideration as a World Heritage Site.
-
4dancing-freak 5:00 PM Jul 9, 2015
A Centuries Old Historical Cemetery with Personal Nostalgia outside Amsterdam
Long after the expulsion of 1497 Sephardi Jews started burying their dead in a cemetery of their own in the early 17th century in Ouderkerk aan de Amstel. There they bought a piece of land adjacent to the river Amstel. There are close to 30000 graves, but many can not be seen anymore. Those graves sunk below the surface of this marshy land, some to a depth of 2 to 3 meters, or 6 to 9 feet. As the caretaker told me, new graves may be dug over these old ones, as space for digging new graves is running out. The tombstones of many graves carry the names of famous people, but there are also tombstones to commemorate family members who did not return from the inferno of the Second World War. In contrast to the graves of Ashkenazi Jews, who's tombstones, according to local custom, stand at the head of the graves, here they lie on the graves, see pictures. During the first summer of the Second World War in The Netherlands, when Jews still had certain freedom of movement, some dared to go over to this cemetery to bask in the sun on warm days and enjoy the feeling of freedom without fear of arrest by the Germans. My father, who survived the war, told me that he was one of them. I added one picture of the stones of Raphael and Judith Pais, my maternal grandparents. As Cohanim, the Jewish priests, are not allowed to come close to the dead, the lanes between the burial plots are hedged with thick scrubs that form a barrier.
