Almost all of the city’s Jewish residents were deported and murdered during the Holocaust
The Groningen photographer Robert Mulder has started a remarkable initiative to have the names of former Jewish residents in the Herewegbuurt in Groningen adopted by current citizens of the city. The adopted names will be placed on signs that will be exhibited on the floor of the Synagogue in the Folkestraat in May.
Volunteers are being sought for the project- each of which will be asked to adopt a name and make a sign. One remarkable response has already arrived, from the grandson of the Jewish doctor Max Roeper, who was betrayed by on of his own patients at the time. As reported by the GIC.
Mulder has photographed the Jewish community in the city of Groningen in recent decades, which led him to the former addressed of the pre-war Jewish residents in the Anna Paulownastraat, where he also lives. This led to an idea to make an overview of all of the Jewish people that lived in the Herewegbuurt and were deported and murdered.
Mulder started looking for a way to, for example, commemorate the tragedies that took place in these homes during the Second World War, and was inspired by the Amsterdam-based project Namen en Nummers. In recent years, residents of Amsterdam’s Oosterparkbuurt made name plates for murdered Jewish neighbors, which were then placed on a map in the street to commemorate their lives.
This led to the plan to lay a street map on the floor of the synagogue in May 2021, with signs with the 119 names of the murdered residents, each at the original address. Local residents and other interested parties can register (via info@robertmulder.nl) to adopt a name and make a sign with information found via the internet.
Image: a ‘stolperstein’, a recent project that commemorates deported and murdered Jewish people across Europe. By Wikimedia user Gerardus.
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