AMSTERDAM — The fireplace that induced vital harm in April to historic buildings in Suriname’s capital metropolis was not the one menace dealing with the close by Neveh Shalom Synagogue.
As firefighters battled to avoid wasting the historic metropolis middle of Paramaribo — a UNESCO World Heritage website — the synagogue’s volunteers had been busy scanning hundreds of archival paperwork in an effort to protect the historical past of the hundreds of Jews who’ve referred to as the Surinamese capital house for the reason that 1700s.
The blaze was contained earlier than reaching the synagogue, however on the mercy of different threats, together with the tropical local weather, bugs and time, it was a reminder of how fragile the 100,000 historic paperwork, saved on pages saved in submitting cupboards for many years, had been and the way important the preservation undertaking was.
The operation to digitize the delivery data, land gross sales and correspondence has been overseen by Dutch tutorial Rosa de Jong, who had used the archive as a part of a PhD examine on how Jewish refugees fled the horrors of World Conflict II to the Caribbean, together with the tiny South American nation of Suriname.
“I felt that my work comes with an obligation to protect the previous that I’m constructing my profession on,” De Jong instructed The Related Press.
When she completed her tutorial analysis, on the College of Amsterdam, final yr, De Jong noticed a possibility to return to Suriname and safeguard the recordsdata that had been essential to her work.
She raised the financing for cameras, exhausting drives and journey bills and returned to Suriname with the purpose of constructing high-quality scans of the a whole bunch of folios held by the synagogue.
The result’s greater than 600 gigabytes of information saved on a number of exhausting drives. One shall be donated to the Nationwide Archives of Suriname to be included of their digital collections.
The archived paperwork present how Suriname was a hub of Jewish life for the Americas. The British who colonized the area gave Jews political and spiritual autonomy once they first moved to Suriname in 1639 to handle tobacco and sugar cane plantations.
When the Dutch took management of the colony, they continued this observe. When Jewish folks had been pressured out of different locations within the Americas, they typically fled to Suriname.
On Christmas Eve in 1942, greater than 100 Dutch Jewish refugees, fleeing the horrors of the Holocaust, arrived in Paramaribo.
Liny Pajgin Yollick, then 18, was amongst them. In an oral historical past undertaking for the USA Holocaust Memorial Museum, she described the aid she felt when she arrived in Suriname to the sound of a well-known track.
“I keep in mind it was morning and so they performed Dutch Nationwide Anthem for us once we arrived, and everyone was crying. We had been very emotional once we heard that as a result of many people by no means thought we might ever hear it once more,” she mentioned.
When the Netherlands was free of Nazi German occupation three years later, Teroenga, the journal revealed for the Jewish congregations in Suriname, ran with the headline “Bevrijding” (“Liberation”). The archive at Neveh Shalom has a duplicate of each version of Teroenga.
Key to De Jong’s preservation undertaking has been 78-year-old Lilly Duijm, who was liable for the archive’s folders of paperwork for greater than 20 years.
Born in Suriname, when she was 14 she moved to the Netherlands the place she ultimately grew to become a nurse. However she returned to her homeland in 1973, simply earlier than the colony acquired its independence, and her 4 kids grew up in Paramaribo.
Greater than anybody, she is aware of how valuable the archive was.
“I instructed the congregation, so long as the archive continues to be right here, I can’t die. Even when I stay to be 200 years previous,” she tearfully instructed AP. “That is holding the historical past of my folks.”