Dutch-led Suriname team digitises 100,000 documents to preserve Jewish history in the Caribbean
AMSTERDAM: The fire that caused significant damage in April to historic buildings in Suriname's capital city was not the only threat facing the nearby Neveh Shalom Synagogue.
As firefighters battled to save the historic city center of Paramaribo — a UNESCO World Heritage site — the synagogue's volunteers were busy scanning thousands of archival documents in an effort to preserve the history of the thousands of Jews who have called the Surinamese capital home since the 1700s.
The blaze was contained before reaching the synagogue, but at the mercy of other threats, including the tropical climate, insects and time, it was a reminder of how fragile the 100,000 historic documents, kept on pages stored in filing cabinets for decades, were and how vital the preservation project was.
The operation to digitize the birth records, land sales and correspondence has been overseen by Dutch academic Rosa de Jong, who had used the archive as part of a PhD study on how Jewish refugees fled the horrors of World War II to the Caribbean, including the tiny South American country of Suriname.
'I felt that my work comes with an obligation to preserve the past that I'm building my career on,' De Jong told The Associated Press.
When she finished her academic research, at the University of Amsterdam, last year, De Jong saw an opportunity to return to Suriname and safeguard the files that had been crucial to her work.
She raised the financing for cameras, hard drives and travel expenses and returned to Suriname with the aim of making high-quality scans of the hundreds of folios held by the synagogue.
The result is more than 600 gigabytes of data stored on multiple hard drives. One will be donated to the National Archives of Suriname to be included in their digital collections.
The archived documents show how Suriname was a hub of Jewish life for the Americas. The British who colonized the region gave Jews political and religious autonomy when they first moved to Suriname in 1639 to manage tobacco and sugar cane plantations.
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