Yeshivat Har Etzion Library - The Amsterdam Room

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Yeshivat Har Etzion Torah Library

The Amsterdam Room

Aharon Bejell - Head Librarian 

The Amsterdam Room in Yeshivat Har Etzion's Torah Library is dedicated in the name of the Etz Chayim Ashkenazi community of Amsterdam. As the community dwindled, the leadership decided in 1990 to transfer the remnants of its Beit Midrash library for posterity and preservation to the Torah Library of Yeshivat Har Etzion. 

This room was specially designed to contain this unique collection of Torah Literature, which is an expression of close to 400 years of Jewish and Torah culture in the Netherlands.

This collection has been enriched with the inclusion of additional items of Torah literature, which were published up to 1940, the onset of the Holocaust. Many of these items were brought to the library from the remnants of Jewish communities in Eastern Europe that were destroyed during the Holocaust, and others, from private Rabbinic libraries, that were donated to the library by their descendants.

This awe inspiring collection is a testimony to the resilience of the spirit of the Jewish People and the centrality of the Torah, and Torah study, which directed them wherever they wandered and under all conditions. This same spirit has motivated us in the development of the Yeshivat Har Etzion Library, and its enrichment with treasures of new Torah literature being published in our generation, as part of the return and revival of our nation in our land, The State of Israel.