Lenny Kuhr arrives at Schipol Airport in 1969 after winning that year's Eurovision Song Contest (Wikimedia Commons)[Missing Credit]
Disruptions of Kuhr’s concerts, who won Eurovision with her song De troubadour, began in 2024 in Waalwijk near Rotterdam.
One protester called Kuhr, who has children living in Israel, “a terrorist, a Zionist” before being escorted out of the venue. Several such incidents have occurred since and her concerts have become targets for anti-Israel activists.
The Rosa Spier retirement home, which is famous for well-known performers moving and performing there, had not replied to JNS’ request for comment at time of publication.
The cancellation follows a string of boycott actions in the Netherlands against Jewish and Israeli performers.
Last year, Amsterdam's Royal Concert Hall announced the cancellation of a Chanukkah concert because one of the performers was a reserve soldier in the IDF. The institution later reversed the decision under threat of legal action.
Earlier in the year, a Dutch singer declined to perform at a Jewish event citing “expressions of Zionism” there. He later claimed that police had advised him to leave the Netherlands for his safety following threats, but a police source reportedly denied this.
The singer, Bob Douwe, also appeared to claim, falsely, that he was Jewish before correcting his statement to reflect that he had been in a relationship with a Jewish woman.
Kuhr told JNS on Wednesday that the incident strengthened her resolve that moving to Israel was the best decision for her.
Asked whether she believed that the artistic scene in the Netherlands is still hospitable enough for Jewish artists who wished to remain neutral on Israel or supported it, she said: “I think it’s becoming increasingly difficult.
"As a Jew, you can still keep working if you’re not a Zionist, or in other words, if you don’t support Israel’s right to exist. Then you’re ‘a good Jew’.”
However, Kuhr told JNS: “Anyone who dares to speak out positively [about Israel] and dares to come out as a Zionist, my expectation is that they’ll have an increasingly tough time booking venues.”
To her post announcing the cancellation, she attached a photograph of a famous monument that stands in southern Amsterdam, not far from where Anne Frank and her family had lived before they went into hiding in the city’s centre.
The monument’s inscription states that “a people that yields to tyrants will lose more than body and property; then the light will go out," a quote from a poem by Hendrik Mattheus van Randwijk, a Dutch resistance hero and journalist during the Second World War.
