A Dutch ‘Noah’ wants to sail his Ark to Israel

Krimpen aan den IJssel, Netherlands — For two years, the world’s only seaworthy life-size replica of Noah’s Ark has been wowing passengers along Holland’s Maas River.

Built according to the specifications of the Hebrew Bible, the 390-foot-long vessel towers to a height of 75 feet. It boasts enough wood to fell 12,000 trees. And its distinct form dominates the coastline of the small town hosting it, deep in southern Holland’s so-called Bible Belt.

Dwarfing even some modern cruise ships, the ark instantly became an international tourist attraction when it was completed in 2012 after four years of construction.

But the man who built it, devout Christian businessman Johan Huibers, who made a fortune building storage spaces, can’t wait to take the mammoth to Israel — a country whose problems and successes, he said, are always on his mind.

“My preferred destination for the ark is Israel,” Huibers, 60, told JTA on the forward deck, which features a life-size statue of a giraffe.

His love for the Jewish state and people, he said, flows from the same impulse that compelled him to raise nearly $5 million to build the ark.

“It may sound scary, but I believe everything written in this book, cover to cover,” he said while pointing at a Dutch Bible. “This is a copy of G-d’s ship. It only makes sense to take it to G-d’s land.”

Huibers said he built it with just seven people over four years, proving that Noah’s Ark could indeed have been built by Noah. He got the idea from reading a story about the ark to his children after supper one evening in 1993.

“I wondered whether someone, Disney perhaps, had already built a replica of the ark,” he said. “And then I said out loud that if none had, I would.”

Huibers’s daughter Deborah excitedly relayed the news to her mother, Huibers’s wife, but it drew little more than an incredulous chuckle.

“She told the kids that after I finish building my ark, we can all go on vacation to the moon,” he recalled.

Thirteen years later, Huibers completed his first replica, dubbed “Johan’s Ark” by Dutch media. It was 230 feet long and 33 feet wide, the maximum measurements for any vessel seeking to negotiate Holland’s canals.

“I wanted to spread G-d’s word in the Netherlands,” he said. But his ambitions grew “when everyone asked me: Why is it only half the size of the one in the Bible? So I sold the smaller one and built a life-size one, too.”

Huibers’s ark isn’t the only on. In 2016, Ark Encounter, a creationist theme park featuring an ark built on a biblical scale, opened in Kentucky. But unlike Huibers’s, the boat in the landlocked state does not float. It was built with more than three times his budget.

Huibers said his crew was made up of amateur carpenters without real training, adding to the overall authenticity of the vessel.

“We had a butcher, a hairdresser and a teacher working here,” he said. “We’re not professional boatmakers. A lot of stuff here is a bit crooked.”

The big ark is made of a steel frame and American cedar and pinewood. Its cavernous interior is surrounded by side decks whose impressive size is magnified even further by their curvature. It is relatively dark inside. The ship features an open amphitheater in its center, connected to the raised deck by a series of stairs that many thousands of visitors, most of them children, have climbed.

The ark is currently closed to visitors because of disagreements between Huibers and this municipality. Krimpen aan den IJssel officials say they favor reopening it, but require “certain adjustment,” citing public safety concerns. Huibers said the ship is safe, insured and equipped with better fire extinguishing equipment than required by law.

He also claims that the reluctance to allow the ark to open in Krimpen — a highly devout town – owes to how some “very strict individuals consider it a forbidden depiction of G-d’s image.”

When it was open to the public, the ark had a small petting zoo, of which only an aviary with parakeets and other small birds remains. Huibers said he does not intend to place living animals in the ark for now, “only to show they could fit.” The boat features stalls, larders and internal gutters for the disposal of refuse.

In addition to wanting to give schoolchildren a tangible experience of Noah’s Ark, Huibers had darker reasons for building the two wooden vessels.

“I believe we are living in the end of times,” he said. “We’re not conscious of it. People never are.”

Growing up in a low-lying country whose population has been fighting back water for more than 1,000 years has given Huibers a better understanding than many of the risks of flooding. He was born five years after the North Sea flood of 1959, which killed more than 2,000 people in a society still crippled by the devastating effects of World War II.

“The water is going to come. From the mountains, from the sea, through Germany. Just like in 1959,” he said. “It sound’s like doom and gloom. But I’m not afraid of it.”

The ark, though, isn’t designed to save Huibers’s life or family, he said.

“It’s meant to educate, a reminder that our world is changing, will continue to change, as we see now because of global warming, rising sea levels, fires. … And to show people that G-d exists.”

As he prepares to take the ark to Israel, he is busy with another project involving water and the Holy Land. Huibers has designed a gravity-based system that he says would transport water from the coastal desalinization plants through the desert and into the shrinking Dead Sea.

In case of a calamity, Huibers does keep a few boats for his family, he said, noting that one of them can hold 100 people.

“Maybe we’ll end up saving the neighborhood one day,” he said.