Twenty-two years after Holland’s last chief rabbi Eliezer Berlinger passed away, the country’s Jewish public is finally getting a new spiritual leader. Representatives of Holland’s Jewish communities assembled last week and picked Rabbi Binyamin Jacobs to serve as the chief rabbi of 11 of the 12 provinces in the country.

Jacobs is a member of the Rabbinical Committee at the Rabbinical Centre of Europe, an organization that includes some 700 communal rabbis in the continent.

Upon his election to the position, Jacobs declared that one of his first objectives would be to locate Holocaust survivors who were adopted by Christian families during World War II and are unaware of their Jewish origins.

Adopting Jewish children was one of the rescue methods used by Dutch citizens during the Holocaust.

After the war there were many cases in which the children’s families and the adopting families engaged in legal battles over the children, many of whom remained in the custody of their non-biological parents.

Tracing people through state archives

According to Rabbi Jacobs, hundreds of these adopted children – now very old people – still live in Holland today and could be traced through state documents.

“For me as a rabbi it is shocking to think that there are people who were born, raised and even died without knowing that they were in fact Jewish,” he stated. “As a rabbi holding an official position it should be easier for me to gain access to such delicate information, and I plan to insist on getting it,” he added.

Rabbi Jacobs said that he himself had several relatives who grew up not knowing they were Jewish.

Holland’s new rabbi also pledged to work for the restoration and preservation of some 200 Jewish cemeteries across the country. Jacobs claimed that the government must also contribute to the conservation of the cemeteries, some of which date back to the 17th Century. “This is an inseparable part of Dutch history, and one that must not be neglected,” he concluded.