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From Julia Neuberger, Senior Rabbi at the west London Synagogue:

I’ve just come back from visiting the Jewish Historical Museum in Amsterdam. Now, Holland was a wonderful country for Jews fleeing the Spanish Inquisition. Amsterdam was a hugely tolerant place in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and Jews became traders and printers, doctors and lawyers. They built magnificent synagogues, and the general atmosphere was one of generosity. Roll forward to the end of the nineteenth century, and many more Jews, desperately poor and persecuted, reached the Netherlands from Russia and Poland, escaping pogroms. In 1940 the Nazis invaded. Dutch Jews were deported in large numbers, and most were murdered. The museum contains short accounts from people who returned from the concentration camps. Many stayed in Holland and tried to rebuild their lives. But many left- for Israel or for the United States- because they could not face their neighbours, and, as we were told on Saturday night by someone who had stayed on with his family as a small child, because their neighbours could not face them. The neighbours had all too often done nothing to help. The same city where brave people sheltered Anne Frank and her family, and many others, also housed people who betrayed their neighbours, and looted their houses. We often talk of how hard it is to forgive. On Saturday night we heard that in many cases the people concerned did forgive- a small percentage of Dutch Jews had at least survived- but they could neither forget nor rebuild trust. We often hear how trust in our doctors, our politicians is at an all-time low. But imagine being people who, after their experiences, couldn’t ever trust their neighbours again. ‘You shall love your neighbour as yourself’, the Bible teaches us, which means treating your neighbours as you’d expect to be treated. But sometimes the neighbours don’t behave as they should. So that Biblical message isn’t just some obvious moral truism. It’s telling us life isn’t always like that, but our duty is to make a supreme effort to be neighbourly in its true sense, and be the protectors, not the looters, so we can always face each other, neighbour to neighbour, with affection and respect.