Dutch open Holocaust museum; Israel head draws protesters

AMSTERDAM — The Netherlands opened the National Holocaust Museum on Sunday with a ceremony presided over by the Dutch king as well as Israeli President Isaac Herzog, whose presence prompted protest because of the Israel-hamas war in Gaza.

The museum in Amsterdam tells the stories of some of the 102,000 Jews who were deported from the Netherlands and murdered in Nazi camps, as well as the history of their structural persecution under German World War II occupation before the deportations began.

The museum “gives a face and a voice to the Jewish victims of persecution in the Netherlands,” Dutch King Willem-alexander said in the address at the inaugural ceremony on Sunday. It also “shows us the devastating consequences that antisemitism can have,” he added.

“That is why we must continue to be aware of how things began and how they went from bad to worse,” the king said. Earlier, the king and the Israeli president visited Amsterdam’s famous Portuguese Synagogue.

Herzog hailed the Netherlands’s initiative to create a new Holocaust museum amid what he said was raising antisemitism around the world.

“At this pivotal moment in time, this institution sends a clear powerful statement,” Herzog said. “Remember! Remember the horrors born of hatred, antisemitism and racism, and never again allow them to flourish.”

Sunday’s ceremony came against a backdrop of the war in Gaza that followed the deadly incursions by Hamas terrorists in southern Israel on Oct. 7.

Thousands of pro-palestinian protesters gathered amid tightened security at the Waterloo Square in central Amsterdam, near the museum and the synagogue. The protest leaders emphasized they were against Herzog’s presence, not the museum and what it commemorates.

Three-quarters of Dutch Jews were among the 6 million Jews murdered by the Nazis.

In a statement issued ahead of Sunday’s opening, the Jewish Cultural Quarter that runs the museum said it is “profoundly concerned by the war and the consequences this conflict has had, first and foremost for the citizens of Israel, Gaza and the West Bank.”

The museum is housed in a former teacher training college that was used as a covert escape route to help some 600 Jewish children to escape from the clutches of the Nazis.