Dutch-led Suriname team digitizes 100,000 documents to preserve Jewish history in the Caribbean

AMSTERDAM (AP) — The fire that caused significant damage in April to historic buildings in Suriname’s capital city was not the only threat facing the nearby Neveh Shalom Synagogue.

As firefighters battled to save the historic city center of Paramaribo — a UNESCO World Heritage site — the synagogue’s volunteers were busy scanning thousands of archival documents in an effort to preserve the history of the thousands of Jews who have called the Surinamese capital home since the 1700s.

The blaze was contained before reaching the synagogue, but at the mercy of other threats, including the tropical climate, insects and time, it was a reminder of how fragile the 100,000 historic documents, kept on pages stored in filing cabinets for decades, were and how vital the preservation project was.

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.”