Mick Hartley

A sign of the times. Pini Dunner at Tablet Magazine – The School My Grandfather Built Was Bombed in Amsterdam:

An explosive device was detonated on Friday night outside the Cheider school in Amsterdam. It struck the outer wall of a building on Zeelandstraat in Buitenveldert. For most readers, it is just another attack against a Jewish institution in a sequence of attacks on Jewish institutions around the world. For me, it is something else entirely.

The Cheider was founded by my late grandfather, Uri Yehuda “Adje” Cohen, a hero who spent the Holocaust years leading a resistance group in Rotterdam against the occupying Nazis while living in hiding in a secret room behind a closet in the home of a gentile friend.

By any standard, he was an extraordinary individual. Far from resting on his laurels after the war, my grandfather devoted the postwar years to rebuilding the decimated Dutch Jewish community.…

An explosive device placed against the wall of a Jewish school carries an obvious message. It is meant to intimidate a community by targeting its children and its institutions.

The attack in Amsterdam did not occur in isolation. The Western world is experiencing the worst surge of antisemitism in decades. Just last week, a man drove a truck into Temple Israel in West Bloomfield, Michigan—one of the largest synagogues in the United States—and opened fire before dying at the scene. Security guards stopped him before the 140 children on the premises were harmed. Similar attacks or attempted attacks on Jewish institutions have occurred across several countries in recent months.

These incidents come at a moment of heightened international tension amid the war involving the United States, Israel, and Iran. The details differ from place to place, but the pattern is unmistakable. Jewish schools and synagogues in Europe and America are increasingly treated as targets, and Jews everywhere are reminded of how fragile security can be.

My grandfather believed that the only answer to hatred was to double down on Jewish life—to strengthen it, expand it, and refuse to allow intimidation to succeed.

The history of the Cheider proves that he was right. The school began at a moment when many believed traditional Jewish life in the Netherlands might never recover from the devastation of the 20th century. One man disagreed. He cleared a table in his apartment and gathered five children around it. That was how the Cheider began.

Today the school still stands on Zeelandstraat in Amsterdam. Children still study there. And the work that began around that table continues.

A bomb may damage a wall. But it cannot destroy what my grandfather built.