By Joost Blokker – Flower wreaths were placed at the Jewish Children monument in The Hague on Yom HaShoah, a day on which Jewish communities around the world memorialize victims of the Holocaust (Shoah). It is observed annually on the evening of the 23rd April through to the evening of the following day. The Jewish Children monument is situated on the Rabbijn Maarsenplein, in the heart of what was formerly the city’s Jewish neighborhood. Its form resembles ladders of varying heights bent into the shape of chairs, empty and inscribed with the names of those who are absent, referring to the approximately 1.700 Jewish children of The Hague who were deported during the Second World War, and subsequently murdered. Of the 17.000 Jews who lived in the city prior to the war, 12.000 never returned.
Within days of the wreaths being placed, they were torn apart and scattered across the square. The shredded flowers were displaced at least sixty meters from where they had been placed. I learnt of this by way of social media and local news.
On the 29th April the chairman of the Yom HaShoah commission of the Council of Churches, in dialogue with people affiliated with the city’s Liberal Jewish community, returned to the monument to lay new flowers. I was invited to attend by my fiancé, who had in turn learnt of the event a few hours beforehand from a congregant of our local synagogue. Of the fifteen or so people present, many were of an older generation, an age whereby one may be a grandparent. The rabbi, a woman in her sixties, greeted me as I approached the monument.
A sense of nervousness had accompanied me on my way there – given the tangible Jewish identity of this event, against a backdrop of increased antisemitic incidents in recent years, as documented by various research bodies, including the team of the National Coordinator of Counter-Antisemitism. However, upon seeing the other attendees, this uneasiness began to somewhat fade. Then again, the sight of at least ten police officers seemed to allude to the underlying risk of volatile interventions.
One older Jewish woman, a survivor of the Shoah, asked me to help adjust the old flowers so that they would lie within the margins of the monument’s grey base. Immersed in this task, I pondered whether to place them inside or outside the silver ring surrounding the base. The woman asserted they should be placed just before the silver ring, which is inscribed with a text explaining the monument’s significance.
The chairman of the aforementioned committee announced they had brought fresh flowers: three new bouquets alongside single flowers. A member of the Liberal synagogue and a Catholic priest handed out the new, white flowers to those present, and we started placing them alongside and amongst the old ones. As I placed my flower, I noticed cigarette butts laying here and there. I picked some up, throwing them behind me, disturbed by the material and symbolic dirtiness of the ashes, as well as the sense of disregard underlining their placement.
After placing the flowers, the rabbi held a speech. She welcomed those who had damaged the original flowers to visit the synagogue, regardless of whether they have anti-Jewish sentiments, or were angry because of the war in Israel and Gaza. She expressed that by visiting the synagogue, these people would see that its members also want peace. I noticed the rabbi seemed tired. She has a busy job, pastoral work and preparing weekly services, and now had to oversee an additional memorialization in between everything else.
The fact this second memorialization had to be held, to repair the previous one, teaches me something new about rituals in public spaces. Namely, that rituals are not just mediated through those who organize them and participate in them. Rituals require more than repetition, traditionalizing narratives, and material mediation to have their intended efficacy. Rituals, and especially rituals that perform a memorialising process, require non-participants to respect those who practice them. When this respect is absent, it becomes unsafe for members of a group to express their history and identity.
After the event drew to a conclusion, everyone involved – including the police – left the square. I wondered whether the flowers would be respected this time. The fear that the material means mediating the memorialization won’t be respected, instills a sense of fracture within the ritual. By the next day, a Jewish participant shared that one of the individuals who’d torn the flowers had been identified – expressing regret for his actions.
Joost Blokker is an alumnus of the bachelor and master programme of Cultural Anthropology at the VU.
