by going into hiding. By placing them with foster families, numerous children were saved while many parents were murdered in the extermination and concentration camps. Some 1,400 Jewish children in the Netherlands thus became orphans. At the end of the war it soon became clear to members of the surviving Jewish communities that many foster families were reluctant in bringing the children back to the Jewish community - many foster parents had grown attached to the Jewish orphans, some had given them a Christian upbringing and simply refused to give them back to the Jewish community, who believed these Jewish children should stay part of the Jewish nation, especially after it became clear that the majority of Dutch Jews had not survived the Holocaust. Some Jewish families desperately tried to "collect" as many as Jewish orphans as they could and serve as a foster family until the children were able to (illegally) emigrate to Palestine. This was also the case in Eindhoven, where most notably Abraham de Jong and his wife gave shelter to some 12 Jewish orphans, most of whom eventually travelled to Palestine. But even these attempts by individual Jews did not prevent that in 1949, some 358 of the 1,400 Jewish orphans had been placed within a non-Jewish environment. Even up to this day, the way how the Dutch government dealt with this issue has caused pain and bitterness within the Jewish community. After the war After the war, the Jewish community immediately started to reconstruct its synagogue in the Kerkstraat (Church Street), which had been severely damaged during a German bombardment on September 19, 1944. On May 22, 1947, it was again put into use. However, due to plans to broaden the Kerkstraat in 1953, the synagogue eventually had to be demolished. This happened in February 1959. On November 17, 1958, a new synagogue was inaugurated in a residential home in the Hendrik Casimirstraat (Hendrik Casimir Street) - it has served as the synagogue for the Jewish community since then. Nowadays, the community is led by M.L. Witsema (not the rabbi of the community); chairman of the community is the 40-year-old Max Loewenstein. The community consists of approximately 70 individuals, although the total number of Jews in Eindhoven and surroundings (including Israeli expats) is thought to be more than twice that number (some 200); however it is believed that several Jewish families in Eindhoven do not