Finding a Place in Jewish Space Mapping Visitors’ Engagement with the Synagogues of Amsterdam’s Jewish Cultural Quarter

While Jews become more discreet about their identity and anti-Jewish behaviour becomes normalised, Jewish religious heritage sites nevertheless continue to serve as gathering places for Jews and non-Jews. This article explores what draws people to these places and how they engage with them, focusing on the synagogues of Amsterdam’s Jewish Cultural Quarter. The study uses grounded theory to analyse surveys, guided tours and walk-and-talk interviews, developing a framework showing how Jews and non-Jews – whether observant, unaffiliated, or secular – relate aspects of Jewish religious life to their own personal, social, religious and cultural experience. It identifies four ways in which people connect: through a sense of belonging, through religious experience, through commemorating, or through celebrating cultural encounters. The study suggests that musealised synagogues remain spaces in which a Jewish presence is presumed, experienced, and continually reinterpreted and negotiated.