Syrian Refugees Offered Shelter In Dutch Village For Jews Who Fled Nazis

TEL AVIV – A Dutch landowner has offered to house Syrian and Iraqi refugees on a site that was formerly a village for Jews fleeing the Nazis, Haaretz reported.

Joep Karel, the owner of the land in Slootdorp, 35 miles north of Amsterdam, made the offer earlier this month to the Dutch government’s Central Agency for the Reception of Asylum Seekers. So far at least 26,000 migrants from the Middle East have arrived in the Netherlands this year.

The cooperative village in Slootdorp was set up in 1934 by local Jews for refugees fleeing Germany and Austria. However, almost all the village’s Jewish residents were eventually murdered by the Nazis.

Jews who were based in the Amsterdam area were either deported to death camps or sent to one of four ghettos. Germany recently recognized Asterdorp as the fourth ghetto, enabling its former residents to claim compensation from Germany.

In September of this year the Amsterdam municipality also agreed to compensate hundreds of Jews who had been fined during the 1940s for failing to pay property taxes while they were in camps, ghettos, or on the run.