A publicly funded museum in the Netherlands has canceled an exhibition about a synagogue because of “tensions following Oct. 7, 2023,” organizers said on Tuesday.
The exhibition, titled “300 Years Amersfoort Shul,” which has been planned for years and was due to begin before the 300th anniversary in February, will not happen because organizers “find the tension that this brings with it difficult,” Paul Baltus, the director of the nonprofit that runs the Amersfoort Museum, told the AD newspaper.
“As a small, vulnerable organization, I do not want to subject my people with that. Of course, you can deploy security guards or install cameras, but the fact remains that our volunteers have to deal with all kinds of possible reactions,” he said.
The chairman of the Jewish Community of Amersfoort, Alexander van Dijkhuizen, told AD that this was part of a “reflex to ban Jewish events” over Israel.
Ronny Naftaniel, a former leader of the Netherlands’ Central Jewish Board, called the organizers’ reasoning “cowardly.”
Naftaniel added in a post on Facebook that a group that combats antisemitism in the Netherlands, STITS, has complained about the Amersfoort Museum to the Ethics Commission for Museums, a body that operates under the auspices of the Dutch Museum Association, among other bodies.
The cancellation follows a string of boycott actions in the Netherlands against Jewish and Israeli events.
In May, the administrators of a prestigious retirement home in the Netherlands canceled a concert by Lenny Kuhr, a Dutch-Jewish singer-songwriter who won the 1969 Eurovision Song Festival, because anti-Israel activists had protested at one of her previous shows.
Last year, Amsterdam’s Royal Concert Hall announced the cancellation of a Chanukah concert because one of the performers was a reserve soldier in the Israel Defense Forces. The institution reversed the decision under threat of legal action.
Earlier in the year, a Dutch singer declined to perform at a Jewish event citing “expressions of Zionism” there. He later claimed that police had advised him to leave the Netherlands for his safety following threats, but a police source reportedly denied this. The singer, Bob Douwe, also appeared to claim, falsely, that he was Jewish before correcting his statement to reflect that he had been in a relationship with a Jewish woman.
