Abstract: This study develops a novel analytical framework to advance studies of monuments. It does so by systematically integrating four elements of a monument’s assemblage – design, surroundings, rituals, and narratives – to examine their combined potential affective impact on visitors’ bodily and emotional engagement with monuments and the past these represent. These four elements will be applied in the comparison of two Dutch Second World War monuments, the National Monument on Dam Square and the National Holocaust Monument of Names. The article reflects on who or what shapes these monuments’ four elements and what kind of potential affective experiences they engender. The results show that the Holocaust Names Monument creates a sacred space for personal and active Holocaust remembrance. In contrast, the National Monument allows more profane, non-commemorative behaviour, except on 4 May, when the Annual Remembrance Day turns it into a sacred site, evoking collective sentiment and remembering of diverse victims. Despite these differences, both monuments seek to foster empathy for individual victims and a sense of responsibility through reflection. These similarities and differences have emerged over time, reflecting the influence of both individual and institutional actors involved in the monument’s design and management, as well as broader socio-political shifts in commemoration.
Topics: Synagogues, Rabbis, Jewish Leadership, Jewish Heritage, Jewish Continuity, Religious Observance and Practice, Religious Denominations, Sephardi Jews, Main Topic: Culture and Heritage, Jewish Museums, Artefacts and Material Culture
Abstract: This article explores how rabbis, directors and members of Amsterdam’s Jewish religious communities view the heritagisation of Jewish religious life by analysing how they interact with Amsterdam’s main synagogues and their collections of ceremonial objects. It focuses on the synagogues of the Jewish Cultural Quarter – the Portuguese Synagogue with its accompanying Sephardi community, and the former Ashkenazi synagogue complex, now the Jewish Museum. From a dynamic heritage perspective, this heterogeneous constellation raises questions about how and why heritage making occurs here. Following a Constructivist Grounded Theory methodology, concurrent data collection and analysis let emerge interrelated conceptual categories that explain how communities interact with these functioning and musealised synagogues and objects: Embodying the transmission of tradition; Instrumentalising the heritage of Jewish religious life; Transforming the beauty of holiness; and Assembling in heritagised synagogues. These categories intersect in the core category of the Jewish religious heritage continuum, which this article presents as a dynamic embodiment of remembering, reconnection, and revival of Jewish tradition. For the interviewees, these performances, and the deployment of functioning and musealised synagogues and collections, form a cultural apparatus that marks their present, diverse and living material culture and grafts a Jewish future onto a Jewish past.
