.svg)
| Total population | |
|---|---|
| About 250 | |
| Regions with significant populations | |
| Reykjavík | |
| Languages | |
| Icelandic,English,Russian,Hebrew | |
| Religion | |
| Judaism |
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Thehistory of theJews inIceland begins with the arrival of the first Jewish trader in 1625. In 2023, around 300 Jews were living in Iceland.[1] The firstrabbi to be permanently located in Iceland since 1918 moved to the country in 2018.[2] The Icelandic word for Jews isgyðingar.[3]
From the eleventh century, Icelanders have called the Jewsgyðingar, a derivative of Guð (God). TheGyðinga saga, the Saga of the Jews, was written in the thirteenth century. It is a translation of theFirst Book of Maccabees and fragments from the writings ofFlavius Josephus.[4][5]
The first Jews in Iceland were traders. Daniel Salomon, a Polish Jew who converted to Christianity, came to Iceland in 1625.[5] In 1704, Jacob Franco, aDutch Jew of Portuguese origin who was living in Copenhagen, was appointed to be in charge of alltobacco exports sold in Iceland and theFaroe Isles.[5] In 1710 Abraham Levin and Abraham Cantor were given similar responsibilities. Isak, Cantor's son, took over from his father in 1731. In 1815, theUlricha, a Jewish trade ship rented by Ruben Moses Henriques of Copenhagen, arrived in Iceland.[5] In 1853, Iceland's parliament, theAlþingi, rejected a request by the Danish king to implement the Danish law allowing foreign Jews to reside in the country.[6] Two years later the parliament told the king that the law would be applied to Iceland and that both Danish and foreign Jews were welcome. The Alþingi said that the Jews were enterprising merchants who did not try to lure others to their religion. However, no Jew is known to have accepted this offer.
In the late nineteenth century there were a small number of trading agents which represented firms owned by Danish Jews. In 1912, Fritz Heymann Nathan, a Danish Jew, joined with entrepreneur Carl Olsen to found Nathan & Olsen in Reykjavík. In 1917, the company moved into new headquarters, a five-story building designed byGuðjón Samúelsson, was the first in Reykjavik to be lit with electricity.[5][7] After his marriage in 1917, Nathan realized it was impossible to conduct a Jewish life in Iceland and moved to Copenhagen; he sold his shares in the company in 1936.[8]
Even after the country receivedhome rule in 1918, Icelandic immigration policy generally followed that of Denmark's.[5] In May 1938, Denmark closed its gates to the Austrian Jews and Iceland did the same a few weeks later. In the late 1930s, theHilfsverein der Juden in Deutschland (the Aid Association of German Jews) wrote a report to the Auswanderberater in Reich on the possibilities of Jewish immigration to Iceland and concluded it was impossible because of the difficulty in obtaining residence permits.[5] In addition, several Jews were expelled from Iceland, some of whom were forced to return to Germany and Austria and died in extermination camps. Icelandic authorities also offered to pay for the further expulsion of Jews to Germany if the Danish authorities would not take care of them after they had been expelled from Iceland.[5]
Otto Weg, a Jewish refugee fromLeipzig, was one of the few allowed to stay in Iceland during the war.[5] Like other refugees, Weg took an Icelandic name when naturalized, as required by law, and adopted the name Ottó Arnaldur Magnússon. He faced significant discrimination and in Iceland was never employed as a geologist, his profession.[5]
Two musicians of Jewish descent arrived in Iceland from Germany shortly before World War II: Robert Abraham (who later adopted the nameRóbert Abraham Ottósson) andHeinz Edelstein. A third musician,Victor Urbancic, was employed in 1938 by the Reykjavík Music Society; his wife, Melitta Urbancic, was Jewish and thus they had to flee Vienna with their three children. The stories of these musicians, and their influence on the musical culture of Iceland, was told by the musicologist Árni Heimir Ingólfsson in a 2025 publication,Music at World's End.[9]
The 1930 census listed no adherents to Judaism. The 1940 census gave their number as 9; 6 men and 3 women.[10] In late 1940, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency reported that a group of about 50 German refugees, many Jewish, lived in Iceland, where they were required to report to the British Security Corps weekly.[11]
On 10 May 1940 British forcesarrived in Reykjavík, and among them were some Jewish servicemen. They did not find a synagogue but eventually did find other Jews who had arrived earlier: Hendrik Ottóson's wife, stepson, and mother-in-law were Jewish, and he contacted the British forces to ask whether any Jewish servicemen wanted to celebrate Jewish holidays.[5]
OnYom Kippur of that year (October 11–12), 25 Jewish soldiers from Britain, Scotland, and Canada gathered with eight Jewish refugees from Germany and Austria.[12] Ottósson, who knew Hebrew, served as theirShammash. The Icelandic authorities had offered a chapel in Reykjavík's old cemetery, but Ottósson found the suggestion insulting and rented a hall from theGood Templars' Lodge.[5] Alfred Conway (formerly Alfred Cohen), a cantor fromLeeds, sang theKol Nidre prayer, and the service was chiefly led by an Anglican chaplain, who read from a Hebrew/English prayer book.[5][11] The group broke the fast at a Reykjavik hotel and, over dinner, the country's first Jewish congregation in Iceland was formally established.[5] The firstbar mitzvah in Iceland took place onShabbatPesach, 1941.[13]
The arrival of U.S. forces brought more frequent Jewish communal events to Iceland, initially organized by Jewish soldiers and then overseen by American military chaplains and supported by theNational Jewish Welfare Board.[14] In the fall of 1941, a weekly U.S. military newspaper noted thatKabbalat Shabbat services were held each Friday near the American Consulate.[15] Rabbi Julius Amos Leibert, an Army Chaplain educated atReform seminaryHUC-JIR, conducted High Holiday services for a congregation of more than 800 in 1942 and, on his way back toJefferson Barracks Military Post, where he was stationed, he held services for Jewish soldiers inGreenland andLabrador.[16][17] Other military chaplains serving the country during World War II includedJTS-trained Rabbi Mayer Abramowitz,HUC-JIR-educated Rabbi William H. Rosenblatt, and Rabbi Harold Gordon, who served the North AtlanticAir Transport Command.[16][18][19]
A 1944Rosh Hashana service at theNaval Air Station Keflavik was attended by 500 Jews and a Torah scroll was flown in from the United States. In 1944, around 2,000 of 70,000 American servicemen in Iceland were Jewish, which warranted a rabbi stationed in Keflavík. There was an active Jewish congregation at the Naval Air Station until the U.S. left the base in 2006.[5]
Though Iceland became independent from Denmark in 1944, the new country was profoundly xenophobic, antisemitic, and concerned with racial purity. As a result, most Jews kept a low profile and tried to attract as little attention as possible. Most were not religious and kept to themselves. In some cases, Jews hid their origins and past from family and acquaintances.[5]
In 2000, Iceland participated in aHolocaust conference inStockholm and signed a declaration of theEuropean Council that obliges member states to teach the Holocaust in their schools.[5]
In 2021, the government formally recognized Judaism as an official religion, recognizing Jewish life cycle events, supporting a Jewish cemetery, and making the Jewish community one to which Icelanders can designate their religious tax payments.[20][6][21] Around 300 Jews are living in Iceland as of 2023.[6]
In the 1980s and 1990s, Jewish expats Mike Levin and Hope Knútsson coordinated some Jewish communal activities, which usually met in a local community center and in the basement ofHallgrímskirkja. Until its closure in 2006,Naval Air Station Keflavik sometimes provided local services with visiting Jewish chaplains.[6][20]
From 2011–2018,Chabad sent young student rabbis to the country for major holidays, usuallyPassover and theHigh Holy Days.[22][23][24] When Rabbi Berel Pewzner led holiday services in 2011, it marked the first formal services with a rabbi and a Torah scroll held in the city since the end of World War II, according to community members.[25] According to the rabbi, it was the first time some of them had heard ashofar.[26] Pewzner and his brother Naftoli served the community until 2017.
In 2018, Rabbi Avi Feldman and Mushky Feldman established a permanentChabad-Lubavitch house in Reykjavik in 2018.[23][27][28][29] (Muskhy Feldman was born in Sweden; her parents established the first Nordic Chabad house inGothenburg in 1991.[6]) They held the country's first menorah lighting in the city center in December 2018, withÓlafur Ragnar Grímsson andDorrit Moussaieff in attendance.[6]
In 2020, Feldman's Chabad received its own commissionedTorah scroll and held aHachnasat Sefer Torah in downtown Reykjavík.[6] That year, Feldman also helped organize the country's first Holocaust memorial service.[6]
Avi Feldman is also amashgiach with his ownhechsher, which he has used to certify local products.[20]
As of 2024, the Jewish Community Iceland Beit Tovah Chabad had purchased a property to be renovated to serve as a Jewish community center. The new facility will have a seminar room, a kosher grocery and take-out restaurant, a dining hall and a full kitchen.[20] They plan to build amikveh but currently use natural springs in the area.[20]
Dorrit Moussaieff, the formerFirst Lady of Iceland (2003–2016), is an IsraeliBukharan Jew born inJerusalem.[5] Moussaeiff has been the target of antisemitism in Iceland, including attacks fromÁstþór Magnússon Wium.[30]
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After the2008 Icelandic financial crisis, scholar Vilhjálmur Örn Vilhjálmsson found increased public attacks on Jewish Icelanders, blaming them for the crisis.[30]
Since 1943, state broadcasterRÚV has annually broadcastHallgrímur Pétursson'sPassiusalmar ("Hymns of thePassion") duringLent, a tradition initiated at the urging ofSigurbjörn Einarsson. For each of the fifty days leading up to Easter, an icelander reads one verse of the hymns.[30] In 2012,Rabbi Abraham Cooper of theSimon Wiesenthal Center attempted and failed to stop this practice, arguing that their many negative references to Jews reinforced antisemitic hatred.[31][32] However, RÚV directorPáll Magnússon rejected the request, telling Cooper to "bear in mind that the hymns are written 350 years ago and they describe the poet's feelings about events that supposedly took place around 2000 years ago."[33] Vilhjálmur Örn Vilhjálmsson has commented that the episode revealed that "no Icelandic researcher on Pétursson's poetry had ever considered whether thePassiusalmar were perhaps not a uniquely Icelandic phenomenon," but representative of European antisemitism prevalent at the time of their writing.[30]
In 2018, legislator Silja Dögg Gunnarsdótir introduced a bill banning non-medical circumcision, and thereforebrit milah, in theAlþingi, Iceland's parliament.[34] It was called an attack on religious freedom by Jewish and Islamic groups.[35] The bill, endorsed by 500 of the country's physicians, gathered the support of all political parties in Iceland, based on the argument that it was a defense of children's rights.[36] The bill also faced major opposition, however. The Icelandic Nurses' Association and the country's director of health, as well as the Icelandic Child Protection Agency, all opposed the bill, arguing that the risk that the procedure would continue illegally and pose greater harms to children and that circumcised boys and men might face anti-religious discrimination.[37][38] The Judicial Affairs and Education Committee recommended the bill's dismissal several months after its introduction and the matter was dropped.[39]
