22-05-2025
KITLV guest researcher Rosa de Jong tells in this article about her project to digitize birth records, land sales and correspondence of Jewish refugees who fled the horrors of World War II to the Caribbean, including Suriname. A team in Suriname digitized 100,000 documents to preserve Jewish history in the Caribbean.
The operation to digitize birth records, land sales and correspondence of the Jewis regfugees in the Caribbean, has been overseen by Rosa de Jong.
Rosa had used the archive of the Neveh Shalom Synagogue in Paramaribo as part of her PhD research on Jewish refugees who fled during the Second World War from the Low Countries via different European ports to the Caribbean, ending up mainly in Jamaica, Suriname and Curaçao.
“I felt that my work comes with an obligation to preserve the past that I’m building my career on”, Rosa told The Associated Press.