August 6: Jewish History and Amsterdam's Architecture

Sorry for the delay! Some technical issues and a brief trip to Paris postponed this post for a few days.

Last Monday, August 6, was quite an eventful day, with city tours and lectures packing our schedule from 9 to 5.

We began the day with a tour of Amsterdam's Jewish Quarter, which happens to be very close to our dorms on Prins Henrikadde. The city's history provides for some very interesting stories and artifacts, such as hidden synagogues, churches, and buildings related to the diamond industry, which the Jewish population brought with them as immigrants, since they were forbidden from the existing guilds in Amsterdam. We were taken to the Dutch Theatre, which served as a Nazi transport site during World War II -- Jews were held there before being sent to work camps in Germany. There we received a lecture on the Dutch impact from the war. Starting with a systematic isolation of Jews from public society in the early 1940s, it resulted 77% of Dutch Jews killed during World War II, compared with about 25% in France and 90% in Poland. The tour ended with a trip to the Jewish Historical Museum, which focused on the local history of Amsterdam's Jewish population, before, during, and after the war. I was personally very interested in seeing and hearing all of this, since I was originally expecting a solid focus on the war.

After lunch, we visted the Amsterdam Center of Architecture, a small building across the street from our dorms, which features architectural models of new construction in the Amsterdam area. There, we received a very interesting lecture on Amsterdam's history through the lens of an urban planner. The city was originally oriented along the water with rich population on the west, to allow them fresh air, while the rest of the population lived closer to the industry downwind. Since then, the city has expanded by way of reclaimed land, and is currently following a growth pattern in "fingers" spreading from the city center so that people have easy access to nature. The day was finished with a walking tour, where we heard many interesting anecdotes about the area, from the fact that bridges are washed down on hot days to prevent too much expansion of the iron structure to how buildings with support piles driven too shallow during construction become slanted over time.

Here's a short video of the day's activities:



From Amsterdam,
Sunil