Nijverdal
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Nijverdal is a town of approximately 22.000 inhabitants in the Dutch province of Overijssel. It is the commercial centre of the municipality Hellendoorn.
Nijverdal (which means Industrious Valley) was founded in 1836 on the territory of the hamlet Noetsele. It was here that the industrial revolution in the Netherlands took root. Thomas Ainsworth (1795-1841) was one of its founding fathers. Textile production was the focus of industrial activity in Nijverdal, as it was for the rest of the Twente region. Some of the traditional factory buildings in the Art Deco or Jugendstil style still remain.
A small river called the Regge runs through the town's centre.
[edit] History
Before world war II Nijverdal had a small Jewish community. Most of the families were related, and worked in the branch of textile, typical for the Jews of the Eastern part of the Netherlands, most of whom worked in textile or bought and sold cattle.The municipal seat of the area, Hellendoorn, had a small synagogue and Jewish cemetery. The synagogue still exists as a storage shed behind one of the houses in the village, and the cemetery is no longer in use. It has about 20 graves, most from the 19th century and early 20th century. The municipality maintains the cemetery and protects it from vandalism.
The Jewish community was essentially erased by the Holocaust. Most of its members perished in Sobibor and Auschwitz.
In 1995, on the occasion of the 50th anniverary of the liberation, the Canadian Veteran Organization helped to build a small monument to the memory of the 11 Jewish families. This monument stands in the old cemetery, and is visible from the road.
After 1945, only 1 Jewish family returned to the village- David Simon Samuel, also knows as Samuel Prins (but that is another story). D.S. Samuel Prins, who survived the war together with his wife and found his two young children still living under assumed names with Gentile families, reestablished his store and tried to rebuild his life. He remained one of the notables of the village, acted as the president of the local chamber of commerce, and worked toward making Nijverdal a prosperous place. After his death in 1975 the store was sold. None of his four daughters remained in the village. Two of them live in Israel today, and two others still live in the Netherlands. Nijverdal, which knew Jewish life for several hundred years, now has no more Jewish inhabitants.
The village has grown into a provincial town, and very few of its citizens know that the Samuel Straat in the village was named in honor of the Samuel family which lived there for so long.
