Jonas Daniël Meyer

Jonas Daniël Meyer

The great thing about having a church tower you can go up in is seeing the city you live in from a different angle. Knowing what the buildings you walk past almost daily look like from 80 meters up. Seeing the roof, Nowadays the Eusebius Church has an glass elevator that takes you to the top floor, but I still remember the days you had to walk up there. I used to give guided tours to children in the summer holidays and would have them count the steps as we went up, mainly because I wanted to know how many steps there were, so I could tell the next group I gave the tour to. In those days you could go all the way up and look over the walls and see out. I don't know why that has changed but you can't go out anymore, instead the lift takes you up 80 of the 95 metres to a floor that will let you look out through glass windows at the city below.

Before showing the rest of the panorama I thought I should take some time to show certain buildings and streets that are of particular historic interest to the city. Most of the immediate streets and buildings surrounding the church were demolished during WW II, when Operation Market Garden took place and later on when the Germans demolished some of the city. Thankfully in later years the ruins were restored and rebuilt.

One of those building is the synagogue, you can see its rooftop in the second photo in the previous post. I work across the street on some days for Studio Unicps when I'm not in the studio in the Koning Street.

The first stone was layed on the 13th of July 1892 or according to the Jewish calender on 26 Tammuz in the year 5612. The synagogue was designed the city architect Hendrik Jan Heuvelink in the eclectic style. He designed quite a few buildings in the part of Arnhem known as the the Spijkerkwartier and has a boulevard named after him.


There used to be a school and a bath-house next to the synagogue but it was destroyed in WW II. The synagogue was built where Jonas Daniël Meijer (1780-1834), the first Jewish lawyer in the Netherlands, was born and raised.
He was a child prodigy, left school at 10, well versed in English, French, Hebrew and Latin, went on to university where he graduated as a lawyer at 16, one of the youngest lawyers ever. He was responsible for the legalalities of the Dutch constitution and was part of the committee that drew up our constitution.


His deep concern with the way the Jewish were treated both socially and financially lead him to write a paper called "Kan de zedelijke waardering van een handeling in aanmerking komen bij de vaststelling en toepassing van een strafwet en zo ja, in hoeverre" (sorry but I'm too lazy tot translate) in which he is one of the first to question to what extent the living conditions and the mental well-being of a criminal can lead to his crime. Basically that means he understood why for instance someone who is poor might steal a loaf of bread and why those conditions should be taken into account on sentencing. His thesis has had an enormous effect on the way judges sentence criminals here in The Netherlands and the world over.


view of the church square through the gates to the synagogue
You will find streets and squares named after him throughout Holland. Most notably the Amsterdam’s Jonas Daniel Meyer Square where you will find the Joods Historisch Museum (Jewish Historical Museum) which I visited a few weeks ago to see the Sarah Bernhard exhibition during the Amsterdam Fashion Week. You can find more on the history of the museum and the 4 synagogues there as well as information on current exhibitions here.


The synagogue can be found in the Pastoorstraat in Arnhem with the everpresent Eusebius Church towering above everything else in the area.