Rembrant

Thursday, August 31

Yesterday, after the flea market, I went to Rembrant's house. His home is in the Jewish Quarter area of Amsterdam. Although Rembrant was not Jewish, he often painted portraits of his Jewish friends. In his house they have a demonstration of how paint was made in the seventeenth century. This type of painting is called etchings. It seems like a tedious yet fun procedure.

This morning I walked around the Jewish Quarters. Once again, it was raining. Still fun to walk around and see the sights.
One of my stops was at the Jewish Museum but before stopping there, I walked through a small park called Wertheim Park. At the park's center is a memorial by sculptor Jan Wolkers to the victims of Auschwitz. Six large broken mirrors lay flat on the ground to reflect a shattered sky and cover a buried urn.
The Jewish Museum building once housed four synagogues built by Jewish refugees from German and Poland.
The first Hebrew words were: teshuvah - repentance; tefillah - prayer and zedaka - almsgiving/charity. That morning at breakfast, I met a girl from Australia. We decided to meet and go to a museum in the afternoon. That night we took a stroll in the Red Light District. Quite a lively place at night. People of all ages walking through.