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AMSTERDAM (JTA) – A Dutch municipality has renamed a park named after a mayor who helped Nazi Jews leave their city.
The municipality of Hogeveen, a city of about 55,000 people about 80 miles northeast of the Dutch capital Amsterdam, ousted Mayor Tjalma Park last month, according to a report published Thursday on news site Jonet. nl. The new call is Municipal Park.
In 2020, a local historian discovered that Jetze Tjalma, who had been mayor of Hoogeveen for 30 years until 1958, was the first mayor of the Nazi-occupied Netherlands to hand over a list of local Jews after the German army’s invasion in 1940.
There were about 250 names on the list. In 1951, Hogeveen had 27 Jews, according to the Jewish Historical Museum in Amsterdam.
Tjalma shared the list voluntarily, according to Brand van Rijn, a local politician whose party, the SGP, introduced studies on Tjalma’s war history. The SGP has been pushing for years for a strategy more critical of Tjalma’s legacy, which many saw as a style. mayor, according to broadcaster RTV. The park is named after Tjalma some time after his death in 1985.
Several years after World War II, the city under Tjalma took over part of the local Jewish cemetery and paved a road there. This part of the cemetery returned to Jewish hands in 2019.
The Amsterdam-based Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies this year showed what was done at Hogeveen by local historian Albert Metselaar, prompting the municipality to replace the park’s call on July 26, Jonet reported.
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