Following a standoff and threats of legal action, the management of the Dutch Royal Concert Hall in Amsterdam on Wednesday decided to rescind its ban on hosting a Chanukah concert featuring an Israeli cantor who serves as a reservist in the Israel Defense Forces.
“In the evening, two private concerts will take place, exclusively for invited guests. Shai Abramson will perform as cantor at these concerts,” the feted venue, the Concertgebouw, wrote in a joint statement on Wednesday, together with the Chanukah Concert Association, whose event the venue tried to veto.
The venue “will donate the proceeds from this event to a charity that promotes social cohesion in the city,” it added.
Last month, the venue said it would cancel the concert in December unless Abramson is replaced as cantor because of his service in the IDF. The association declined, calling this an unacceptable interference in artistic and religious freedoms, and announced legal action.
Israel’s Minister for Diaspora Affairs and Combating Antisemitism Amichai Chikli celebrated the development. “We have come to banish darkness,” he wrote on X, quoting a Chanukah song. “This is a very important victory that follows a persistent struggle. I am glad that the public pressure led by the Jewish community in the Netherlands, together with non-Jewish Dutch activists, who fought against the blatant discrimination against the Jewish community, did their part and led to the change in the decision.”
Ahead of the concerts featuring Abramson, which the association had planned as a private event, the venue will hold, “A concert for everyone, young and old, in which the focus is on being together around this festival of light, without Shai Abramson, conducted by Jules van Hessen,” the statement said.
“The Concertgebouw remains of the opinion that, in the current polarized climate, the cantor, who is Chief Cantor of the IDF, cannot perform at the Concertgebouw. This is due to his symbolic role in the IDF, which is involved in a war that divides our society,” added the statement. However, the Concertgebouw will host Abramson because “we all agree” that a legal battle “would not be good for anyone—not for the Concertgebouw and certainly not for the city of Amsterdam.”
Jewish community members and leaders, as well as their Christian allies, have demonstrated in recent days in front of the venue in protest of the attempted boycott.
Last week, a Jewish lawyer, Oscar Hammerstein, presented on X a document that he said showed that the grandfather of the current director of the Royal Concert Hall, Simon Reinink, was the official who on Nov. 23, 1940, signed an order that terminated the employment of a Jewish professor from Leiden University.
The fired professor was Eduard Maurits Meijers, who survived the Holocaust and, after World War II, drafted the current Dutch civil code, the Nieuw Burgerlijk Wetboek. The document presented by Hammerstein was signed by Hendrik Jan Reinink, then the secretary-general of the education ministry under German occupation, and Simon’s grandfather.
