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On Judaism in Iceland

A few days after New Year’s two years ago I took a walk around my dad’s neighborhood in Vesturbaer (the west side of Reykjavík). The night was crisp and clear and the sky was occasionally blotted by leftover fireworks people set off just for kicks.

Originally, all I had intended to do was pop round 10/11 (our local mini supermarket) and pick up some Nóa lakkríssprengjur and flatkökur (flat, soft bread) but on the way back I was sort of transfixed by the clusters of seafront homes and started aimlessly pattering about the area around my dad’s place snaking my way through the small spindly streets.
I wouldn’t go as far as saying I’m a peeping Tom but I like to look at houses and sometimes I make up stories in my head about the people who live there. After about five minutes I passed a house with the Star of David in a stain-glass window and it stopped me in my tracks.
It was a beautiful window; the colors illuminated out into the dark night from inside and like a bright yellow beam the shape of the star glowed on the pavement.

Though it might, as my dad later told me, be a symbol for the freemasons it got me wondering why I had never met a Jew living in Iceland.
The other night I dreamt about that walk and the star and once I woke up I decided to look into Judaism in Iceland because as far as I could remember I didn’t think I’d ever heard a Jewish name in Iceland.
Turns out the reason I never heard a Jewish name in Iceland (excluding the odd tourist I mean) is according to author Alfred Joachim Fischer, who visited Iceland in 1955 all the Jews who settled in Iceland were naturalized and had taken Icelandic names (which the law demanded) after the Second World War.

Apparently after the war the Jews residing in Iceland kept an extremely low profile so as to attract as little attention to themselves as possible (but then after the Holocaust, I would have erred on the side of caution too) and in some cases Fischer reported Jews hiding their origin from their acquaintances for fear of anti-Semitism.
To be fair though, the Icelanders don’t have the best track record of opening our arms to foreigners (you might remember me expounding how we hunted down Spanish whale hunters and brutally murdered the lot of them).

In 1853 the Icelandic Parliament Althingi, even rejected a request by the Danish king to allow foreign Jews to reside in the country. The judgment was overturned two years later and Jews were allowed freedom of movement within Iceland but why would you want to go if the Icelanders were being so obviously rude?

As a result there was no real Jewish presence in Iceland till 1906, when Mr. Fritz Heymann Nathan came to the island from Denmark. He very quickly became a wealthy merchant and is responsible for building Iceland’s first five-story building entirely lit by electrical lights.
But Iceland didn’t suit him it seems and soon after getting married in 1917 he packed up his bags and moved back to Copenhagen deeming Iceland an impossible place to conduct a Jewish Life.

Twenty-three years later in 1940 when the English invaded Iceland, Yom Kippur was observed for the first time. This happened because of a group of Jews serving with the English, Scottish and Canadian armies as well as a few Jewish refugees found one another and were determined to practice their faith despite the lack of Icelandic resources.

With the help of Hendrik Ottósson, who had married a Jewish woman and wanted to serve as their Shammash, they rented out a hall in the Good Templar’s Lodge in Iceland and then managed to find Iceland’s only copy of the Torah.

It was the first non-Christian religious ceremony in 940 years and following that there was a growth in Jewish activity until of course the war ended, the soldiers went home and as I mentioned in the beginning of the piece it only took ten years for the Jewish community to be “naturalized.”
It’s a shame, that there is now a seemingly nonexistent Jewish community in Iceland. Religious observance is pretty liberal now and it seems silly that no one has even tried to register Judaism as a religious institution in Iceland.

Click here to read more about Judaism in Iceland.

IcelandReview - Online