Amsterdam - The fires that caused significant damage to the historical buildings of the Suriname capital in April were not the only threat facing the nearby Neveh Shalom synagogue.

While firefighters fight to save the historic city center of Paramaripo (UNESCO World Heritage Site), synagogue volunteers are busy scanning thousands of archive documents to preserve the history of thousands of Jews since the 1700s known as Surinamese Capital Home.

The fire was before reaching the synagogue, but at the mercy of other threats, including tropical climate, insects and time, a reminder of how fragile 100,000 historical documents that are kept on pages stored on filing cabinets for decades, and the vital importance of preserving projects.

The action to digitize birth records, land sales and letters has been supervised by Rosa de Jong of Dutch Scholar, who used the archive as part of a doctoral study on how Jewish refugees fled the horrors of World War II to the Caribbean, including the small South American island of Surrey.

“I feel like my job has an obligation to retain the past I am building my career,” Dezhong told the Associated Press.

Last year, when she completed her academic research at the University of Amsterdam, Dai Zhong had the opportunity to return to Suriname and protect documents that were crucial to her work.

She raised financing for cameras, hard drives and travel expenses and returned to Suriname to carry out high-quality scans of hundreds of portfolios held by the synagogue.

The result is 600 gigabytes of data stored on multiple hard drives. One will be donated to the Suriname National Archives to include it in its digital collection.

Archived documents show how Suriname became a hub for Jewish life in America. The British who colonized the region first moved to Suriname to manage tobacco and sugarcane plantations in 1639, granting Jews political and religious autonomy.

When the Dutch controlled the colonies, they continued this practice. When the Jews were forced to leave the rest of the Americas, they often fled to Suriname.

On Christmas Eve in 1942, more than 100 Dutch Jewish refugees who fled the horror of the Holocaust arrived in Paramaribo.

Liny Pajgin Yollick, who was 18 years old at the time, was among them. In an oral history project at the American Holocaust Memorial Museum, she describes her comfort in the sound of a familiar song when she arrived in Suriname.

"I remember it was morning and they played the Dutch anthem for us when they arrived and everyone was crying. When we heard this, we were so excited because many of us never thought we would hear it again."

Three years later, the Netherlands liberated the Nazi German occupation from the Nazi German occupation, which was published for the Jewish congregation in Suriname, titled "bevrijding" ("Liberation"). Neveh Shalom's archive has copies of each Teroenga.

The key to saving the project is 78-year-old Lilly Duijm, who has been in charge of the file folders for more than twenty years.

Born in Suriname, she moved to the Netherlands at the age of 14 and eventually became a nurse. But she returned home in 1973, just before the colony gained independence, her four children grew up in Paramaribo.

She knows more than anyone how precious the archive is.

"I told the congregation that as long as the archives are still here, I will not die. Even if I live to be 200," she told the Associated Press in tears. “This keeps the history of my people.”