The Portuguese Synagogue has never been wired for electric light. Evening services are still held by candlelight, close to a thousand candles when the whole building is lit, in twenty-six brass chandeliers hung in three patterns. Fine sand is spread over the pine floor, an old Dutch habit that soaks up wet from shoes and deadens footsteps. Twelve stone columns carry the women's gallery, and the benches face each other down the length of the hall in the Sephardic arrangement.
It was the largest synagogue anywhere when it opened in 1675, and it has never been heated, so you keep your coat on through the winter. The families who built it descended from Jews forced to convert in Spain and Portugal, and they came to Amsterdam because here they could worship openly. Three congregations merged in 1639 to pay for it, and the whole thing rests on some three thousand wooden piles driven twelve metres down to a sand layer. The war left the building undamaged and the congregation destroyed: most of its members were deported and never came back. It reopened four days after the liberation.