Some chose to stay in the Netherlands, and more and more Yiddish-speakers ended up settling in Amsterdam, as much of post World War I Europe was in disarray.
![ashkanazi cyndicate ashkanazi cyndicate](https://cdn.jns.org/uploads/2018/05/F130804MA02-640x360.jpg)
The end of the war meant that they could return to Belgium. During World War I, when Belgium expelled many Yiddish-speaking Jews as “enemy aliens” from the Austro-Hungarian empire (with which it was at war), quite a few ended up across the border in the neutral Netherlands. Native-born Dutch Jews, too, saw Yiddish-speaking migrants as needing assistance to reach their final destinations, not as potential community members. Whereas early modern Ashkenazi Jews established Yiddish printing houses in seventeenth-century Amsterdam, making the city a central of the early modern Yiddish cultural world, the eastern European Yiddish speakers who began arriving there in 1881 saw the Netherlands as a way-station. The Ansky Society also started a small hectograph called Friling (Springtime), a newsletter for the Society’s members.
![ashkanazi cyndicate ashkanazi cyndicate](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/PvBc7keo7l0/maxresdefault.jpg)
It did, however, establish the Ansky Society, which had a well-known drama group, a small but important library of books donated by its members, and ultimately served as a place for immigrant social and cultural community. Unlike most interwar Yiddish-speaking communities in places like New York, Paris, Moscow, or Buenos Aires, Yiddish speakers in the Netherlands never established a permanent Yiddish theatre or daily newspaper, cultural institutions that mark an immigrant community as rooted in a particular place.