Constructing Memory Through Communal Praying: How the Orders of Service of Special Occasions Contribute to the Functioning of Amsterdam's Esnoga as a Site of Memory

Abstract

This article discusses the function of Amsterdam’s Portuguese Synagogue (Esnoga) as a site of memory for the Sephardic community. Besides providing a historiography of this community in Amsterdam and discussing the postwar development of the memory of the Holocaust in the Netherlands, concepts from memory studies and a framework for psalm analysis are employed to analyze the communal praying in three of the Esnoga’s Orders of Service of special occasions from the period 1961 (the Eichmann trial) until 1989 (the fall of the Berlin Wall). This analysis illustrates how the Esnoga is a space in which the Sephardic community can performatively engage with their collective shared knowledge of the past: the mythic past as well as the recent past of the Holocaust. In this way, memories are constructed and expressed which constitute the group’s sense of unity and identity. The memorialization of the past and visions for the future are reconstructed in the Orders of Service in four ways: the psalms and prayers transmit memories over generations; the act of communal praying continually invests the psalms and prayers with new meanings; they provide a distinct, Godly view of reality; and they structure a feeling of communality across time and space. The communal praying in the Orders thus illustrates how the Esnoga allows for the transmission of memories through external symbols by acting as a site of memory in which the identity of the Sephardic community is expressed, transmitted, and affirmed.