The Portuguese Synagogue

There's this massive church-like structure at the end of Jodenbreestraat (translated as Jewish Broad Street). Except that its a synagogue, which is really the only thing that made it stand out in my head.

I thought it a little too big for what I'm used to in terms of synagogue sizes. And a little too old. Built in the 1600s, surrounded by a courtyard, it looks imposing, nothing like the small worship rooms I'm used to. This is something straight out of old Europe, stone and wood and wrought iron.

We land on a Friday, so after getting settled into the rooms and grabbing a nap (or multiple naps, you know, each of us doing our own napping), we decide to try to go for services. Except none of us are religious and so none of us knows when services end. So by the time we finally walk all the way over to it, 20 minutes from our hotel, its completely dark and the synagogue looks long abandoned.

We walk along the outside looking for signs of activity. All windows reveal darkness inside. We see a buzzer which someone pushes despite my entreaties not to, seeing as how the sabbath has began and everything. When no one answers we continue around the side until we finally spot a lightly furnished room with a table and about 20 people sitting down for a meal.

I'm feeling we're too late, that its rude just to show up for a meal we never registered for and especially after we just happened to miss services. Its one thing if you go for services and then hang around looking sad and hungry until someone invites you to dinner. But its just different if you pop in when all the praying is done, when you just get to benefit from a free meal. Of course, as Jews looking for a sabbath meal, for sabbath company, its not crazy to think we could just pop in and be accepted. But that acceptance weighs heavy on my mind, because it borders on manipulation, at least as far as I'm concerned. A religious person's hands are tied - they have a duty to invite you in out of the cold. But I can be a little discreet in terms of the situations I put them into, the situations that corner them into inviting me in.

So I don't want to go into the room. I stand by the curb recognizing that we're too late, that we've missed our chance with connecting to the Jewish community here.

Its at this point that the groundskeeper emerges from around the corner and goes about eyeing us suspiciously. He says something in dutch and we don't understand.

"English?" sheepishly asks a friend.

The groundskeeper melts into the dark around him, and even though he's small in stature, his face is stern and he looks imposing, a ghost-like protector.

"What are you doing here?"

"We just landed today. We came for services."

He glances at his watch, "at this time? So late?"

Doesn't he believe us? Why is he interrogating us?

"Oh, well, we're not religious."

He just looks on, as if this isn't enough of an explanation to make him understand.

I continue - "we didn't know what time it got dark."

His jaw relaxes. I realize he's been clenching it the entire time.

"Yes, you are very late. Services ended more than 30 minutes ago."

"Ok."

I want him to say something more but he's not being very helpful. I automatically lighten the pitch of my voice, which is something I notice that I do when I want to be as polite as possible, when I'm trying to win someone over.

"And what about tomorrow? When are services?"

He begins an explanation about their schedule when a young woman shows up and approaches our conversation. She takes over in talking with me and tells me when we could come back the next day if we were interested in participating.

When she's done, I point to the building hanging over us, still shrouded in the cold mistiness that was there through our entire trip.

"How many people use this, go to this synagogue?"

"Our congregation has about 300 families in it."

I don't say it but I think it - wow, only 300 families, and with such a large space? Do they really need such a big place? Do they really need to be so ostentatious about it? A synagogue this size, a synagogue that looks like a church, in such a central and flashy location?

We head off into the Amsterdam evening, towards one of many coffeeshops we'd visit that night, and quickly forget about the synagogue or any Jewish thing we had considered doing. Amsterdam became Amsterdam again.

The next day I walk to the Anne Frank House with a few guys. This self-emergent exploration of Amsterdam Jewishness isn't something that was intentional, and I have no desire for it to consume my trip, but scheduling just has it work out that way, that the house is the first thing I feel like seeing, even before the Rijksmuseum or Van Gogh.

Inside we walk through the rooms where Frank and her family hid for 2 years. We stare out of windows that overlook friendly streets, once spoiled by the trampling of Nazis and long lines of cattlized Jews being led away. Frank watches all this and she writes it down, and in the day she "creeps as quiet as a mouse" so that no one working in the factory downstairs, including people that seemingly had no knowledge of the Jews hiding above, would hear them.

Its strange to walk these floors and touch these walls, some still preserved with the paper cut outs she pasted on it to liven up the space, to add some color, some element of dreaming to the whole secret apartment hidden behind a half-sized bookcase that, when I see it, makes me wonder how secret their being there really was? It looks comical to me, clearly out of place, clearly alerting anyone who should come across it that something else might lie behind, particularly when you consider that from the outside, the building is still a 4 floor structure that could accommodate a whole slew of people above its factory-operating ground and basement floors.

But for two years this all somehow worked. And for two years Anne and everyone else in this hideout who used this one bathroom passed this exact mirror and saw themselves looking back at themselves and wondered about the world outside that was forcing them to become what they had become.

Just a girl, I think, and, I know girls, or women who were once girls, and anyone of them could have been here, could have cried and laughed and feared behind these walls like she did. That's when being there means more to me than just reading some plaques on some walls and watching my own feet scrape the veneer off the sloping edges of the stairs. It's cold here, even with all of these people crammed into the rooms, even with the TVs and DVD players looping minute-long video bits of commentary that's, somehow, supposed to make all of this a little easier to digest.

Outside someone taps a friend of mine on the shoulder. A group of tourist girls from, what sounds like Italy, asks him to take their picture. The ten or so of them gather together at the base of the house, next to a little sign that quietly identifies it, recessed several feet from the busy corner with the crowds waiting to get into the museum wing of the experience. They smile and joke, they hold up peace signs, and as he snaps their photo I just shake my head.

It's only when I pass the synagogue again later that night that I make the connection I hadn't made before - at one point this country had 120,000-130,000 Jews, and about 100,000 of them never returned. Suddenly it's size isn't an affront to a City, a loud flag that makes me want to avert my eyes because for some reason I seem ashamed of Jews proclaiming their presence and would probably prefer a more whispered announcement. Now it's a sad monument, a hushed tomb that has creaked in the wind for hundreds of years and now sits mostly hollowed of the company it once kept. An ugly side of the continent that I realize I had never experienced firsthand before. There had been those trips to France and Spain and Italy and Greece and Turkey, but I never explored those countries with the same mindset I have somehow developed in the last few years. I never cared to see a Jewish star hanging on a building nor tried to seek them out. And so really this is the first time that I'm here and the first time I understand what it means when they say that whole communities were wiped out, that a way of life was so nearly eradicated. I can't even fathom, the idea that there were so many Jews here at one point. Those kinds of numbers speak to the fact that there will never be that many Jews here again.

We finally do get to go inside the synagogue a couple of days later. In the vast hall that no one else is visiting while we are there, a friend of mine breaks into a classic Jewish melody. The walls shakes, the beams echo the words back to us, and it all feels right, as if by us being there we have brought something back that has been missing all this time, a piece of a city or a country, a piece of its heart, it's lost people. I heard the words, I felt the world move, and I dreamed that here, the music would play forever.