Dutch Jews and non-Jews wear orange kippa to protest antisemitism

Wearing a bright orange kippa, Ronny Naftaniel, a former leader of Dutch Jews, examines items at a junkyard sale in a village in the east of the Netherlands.

The eye-catching kippa is part of an initiative co-launched by two prominent non-Jewish Dutch actors, Huub Stapel and Hans Teeuwen, to protest antisemitism on King’s Day on Saturday. On that national holiday, Dutchmen wear their national color of orange in honor of their royal house, and many attend junkyard sales across the kingdom.

Baruch Van Riel, a Jewish wine importer from Baarle-Nassau, a small town near the border with Belgium, writes on Facebook that he wore an orange kippa to synagogue on Saturday.

Stapel tells the Hart van Nederland news site that the hundreds of orange kippot that he and Teeuwen ordered for King’s Day are in demand. The team’s call for mayors to wear the kippot in solidarity with Dutch Jews has failed to enlist any of the mayors of the Netherlands’ large cities, he says

“I think it’s a little lame,” Stapel tells the Hart van Nederland website about the absence of a response by mayors amid reports that the number of antisemitic incidents in 2023 reached an all-time record of 379 cases, most of them after October 7. “It’s no political statement, it’s an attempt at connecting people so the country doesn’t fall apart,” Stapel tells Hart van Nederland.