AMSTERDAM – In April, a fire inflicted significant damage to historic structures in Suriname’s capital, which posed a substantial threat to the nearby Neveh Shalom Synagogue.
While firefighters worked tirelessly to protect Paramaribo’s historic city center, recognized as a UNESCO World Heritage site, volunteers at the synagogue were busy digitizing thousands of archival documents. Their efforts aimed to safeguard the rich history of the Jewish community, which has resided in Suriname’s capital since the 1700s.
Though the synagogue was spared from the fire, it remains vulnerable to other threats like the tropical climate, insects, and the passage of time. This incident underscored the delicacy of the 100,000 historic documents, stored for years in filing cabinets, and highlighted the importance of the preservation initiative.
The operation to digitize the birth records, land sales and correspondence has been overseen by Dutch academic Rosa de Jong, who had used the archive as part of a PhD study on how Jewish refugees fled the horrors of World War II to the Caribbean, including the tiny South American country of Suriname.
“I felt that my work comes with an obligation to preserve the past that I’m building my career on,” De Jong told The Associated Press.
When she finished her academic research, at the University of Amsterdam, last year, De Jong saw an opportunity to return to Suriname and safeguard the files that had been crucial to her work.
She raised the financing for cameras, hard drives and travel expenses and returned to Suriname with the aim of making high-quality scans of the hundreds of folios held by the synagogue.
The result is more than 600 gigabytes of data stored on multiple hard drives. One will be donated to the National Archives of Suriname to be included in their digital collections.
The archived documents show how Suriname was a hub of Jewish life for the Americas. The British who colonized the region gave Jews political and religious autonomy when they first moved to Suriname in 1639 to manage tobacco and sugar cane plantations.
When the Dutch took control of the colony, they continued this practice. When Jewish people were forced out of other places in the Americas, they often fled to Suriname.
On Christmas Eve in 1942, more than 100 Dutch Jewish refugees, fleeing the horrors of the Holocaust, arrived in Paramaribo.
Liny Pajgin Yollick, then 18, was among them. In an oral history project for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, she described the relief she felt when she arrived in Suriname to the sound of a familiar song.
“I remember it was morning and they played Dutch National Anthem for us when we arrived, and everybody was crying. We were very emotional when we heard that because many of us never thought we would ever hear it again,” she said.
When the Netherlands was freed from Nazi German occupation three years later, Teroenga, the magazine published for the Jewish congregations in Suriname, ran with the headline “Bevrijding” (“Liberation”). The archive at Neveh Shalom has a copy of every edition of Teroenga.
Key to De Jong’s preservation project has been 78-year-old Lilly Duijm, who was responsible for the archive’s folders of documents for more than two decades.
Born in Suriname, when she was 14 she moved to the Netherlands where she eventually became a nurse. But she returned to her homeland in 1973, just before the colony got its independence, and her four children grew up in Paramaribo.
More than anyone, she knows how precious the archive was.
“I told the congregation, as long as the archive is still here, I will not die. Even if I live to be 200 years old,” she tearfully told AP. “This is keeping the history of my people.”
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