Jewish Museum

What stands in front of you is not one building. It is four synagogues, built side by side between 1671 and 1752 and joined into one museum.

They were built by the Ashkenazi Jews of Amsterdam, families who had come from Germany and eastern Europe. The Great Synagogue came first, in 1671, four years before the Portuguese Synagogue across the square. It was soon too small. In the 1680s a second was built beside it, upstairs, over a kosher meat hall. A third followed in 1700. The fourth, the New Synagogue with the dome, opened in 1752. It is the largest, with seats for nearly a thousand people.

For more than two and a half centuries this corner was the centre of Ashkenazi religious life in Amsterdam. In 1753 Sara Rintel gave the Great Synagogue a silver lamp for the festival of Hanukkah, more than a metre high. That lamp still stands in its place.

In the early 20th century many Jewish families moved to newer districts, and the synagogues grew quieter. Then came the German occupation. Most of the people who prayed here were deported and murdered. The last service in the Great Synagogue was held in September 1943. The empty buildings were plundered, and in the last, hungry winter of the war the galleries were torn out for firewood.

They did not become synagogues again. The city bought the complex in 1954 and began repairs. The Jewish Museum, which had itself been shut by the occupiers and had lost most of its collection, opened here on 3 May 1987. The alley between the synagogues was roofed with glass and steel and became the way in. The new parts were made plainly modern on purpose, to mark the break. Look for that seam between the old brick walls. On either side of it are rooms where people prayed for more than 270 years. Inside, the museum tells of Jewish life here, then and now.