The Enschede branch of Volt, the pan-European federalist party, has declined an invitation to today’s commemoration of the 1941 Twente razzia, or raid, in the eastern Netherlands, after organisers refused to widen the ceremony to include Gaza.
The annual service in Enschede’s synagogue marks the events of September 13-14, 1941, when Nazi security police and local officers seized 105 Jewish men from across the region in reprisal after the local resistance had cut Wehrmacht telephone cables.
Of those arrested, 66 were seized in Enschede. Some 40 non-Jewish men were also detained and later released, according to the local weekly Huis aan Huis Enschede.
The men, aged 17 to 54, were held in a school gymnasium in Enschede before being deported to Mauthausen, a concentration camp in Nazi-annexed Austria. None returned and all had died within four months.
It was the third large-scale round-up of Jews in the occupied Netherlands that year, after two raids in Amsterdam in February and June.
Political parties were invited to this year’s commemoration.
Volt Enschede said it would attend only if the programme were adapted, regional broadcaster 1Twente reported.
Group leader Anna Kaal, Volt’s sole councillor on the 39-seat municipal council since the March 18 local elections, wrote that the ceremony needed “broadening” to the present day.
Rising anti-Semitic incidents, she argued, were “often connected to the many innocent victims of the Israeli government’s actions in Gaza and Jewish settlers among Palestinian residents of the West Bank”.
A commemoration focused only on preventing anti-Semitism could, she said, leave Enschede’s Muslim community feeling that “their experiences are forgotten”.
The party cited a statement by the World Union for Progressive Judaism (WUPJ) and sent an open letter to the press after first approaching the committee.
Issued in August 2025, the WUPJ text condemned Hamas’ treatment of Israeli hostages and called on the Israeli government to “speak honestly about the humanitarian situation in Gaza”.
The Comité Herdenking Razzia Twente (Twente Razzia Commemoration Committee) refused.
The raid, it said, took place entirely in Twente and killed 105 local men, “from a destitute day labourer dragged from a meagre caravan beside his elderly mother to members of textile manufacturers’ families”.
Its message was that this must never happen again, “neither in the Netherlands nor anywhere else in the world. Neither to Jews, nor to any ethnicity.”
The committee called it “absurd” to hold Dutch Jews responsible for Israeli government policy and said it would not take a position on the WUPJ text, noting that the Jewish community worldwide is itself divided on what happens in Israel.
It said it represented Orthodox, Conservative, Liberal and unaffiliated Jews alike.
“We commemorate the murdered people of Twente who were taken away in this razzia,” said Bert Oude Engberink, a committee member and leader of the Liberal Jewish Congregation of Twente.
“We as a committee will not speak out against the government policy of Israel, however left or right it may be, just as we do not about the Dutch government.”
Oude Engberink said he regretted Volt’s decision but invited Kaal for coffee another day.
The service is due at 1pm on September 10, with names of the dead read by primary-school pupils, flowers, and addresses by Oude Engberink, historian Gerben Post and Chief Rabbi Binyomin Jacobs.
The Centre for Information and Documentation on Israel (CIDI), which campaigns against anti-Semitism and for Israel’s security, publicised Volt’s absence, saying 105 murdered Jews “may no longer stand on their own”.
The Enschede decision sits in a wider Dutch pattern in which Holocaust remembrance has been drawn into argument over the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza, including protests.
The opening of the National Holocaust Museum in Amsterdam was targeted by protestors amid sickening chants of anti-Semitic hatred such as “Get lost, cancer Jews”. https://t.co/dNb7t43UzV
— Brussels Signal (@brusselssignal) March 11, 2024
