SURINAME - 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 Sha-lom Synagogue.
As firefighters battled to save the historic city centre 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 digitise 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. (Jamaica Gleaner/AP)
