The editors of the Joods Monument website are not actively looking for this group of victims themselves, but would like to receive information about the fate of Dutch Jews in the Dutch East Indies during the Japanese occupation. This mainly concerns Jews, born in the Netherlands, who left for the Dutch East Indies shortly before the start of the Second World War or during the war.
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Between 13 October 2014 and 8 March 2015, the Joods Historisch Museum (now Jewish Museum, organized an exhibition about the unknown history of Jews in the Dutch East Indies: Selamat Sjabat, with documents, photos, historical objects and stories from the late nineteenth century, the colonial era, the war in the Pacific and the post-war period.
The number of Jews in the former colony of the Dutch East Indies has always been limited. They came from different countries. The largest group were the Dutch Jews, who mainly lived in the large cities on the islands of Java, Sumatra and Celebes (Sulawesi). Around 1940, the Dutch East Indies had a total of about 70 million inhabitants. The number of Jews is estimated at three to five thousand. This included several hundred Jewish refugees from Germany, Austria and Palestine.
The exhibition focused on Japanese rule, which began with Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941 and ended with the capitulation on 15 August 1945. In short films, survivors told about their daily lives in the Japanese internment camps. The exhibition was accompanied by a website on which personal memories, anecdotes, photos, photographs of objects about Jewish life in the Indies could be added.
Collaboration has been sought with the editors of the website: www.indieindeoorlog.nl, which tries to bring together all sources related to the Indies heritage of the Second World War. For figures on victims of Japanese rule in general, the NIOD website provides clear information:www.niod.knaw.nl/en.
The website Joods Monument lists names of Dutch Jews who died as soldiers of the Royal Netherlands East Indies Army (KNIL) or who died in some other way in the Indies. However, this list is far from complete.
Some examples are:
Louis Mossel. He left for Malang in 1937 and is buried as a KNIL soldier in the war cemetery in Thailand.
Nathan Ikkersheim, who was a prisoner of war on a ship that was torpedoed.
Bernard Jose van der Linde who went to the Dutch East Indies as a KNIL soldier before the war and was shot down by enemy fire in 1944.
As far as we know, there are no specific lists of names of Dutch-Jewish victims who died in the Indies archipelago.
See also: The Juyo Maru, a forgotten shipping disaster
Please send your reactions by email to the editors of the Joods Monument: joodsmonument@jck.nl