Reykjavík Grapevine - 01.02.2013, Blaðsíða 17

17 The Reykjavík GrapevineIssue 2 — 2013
Iceland follows Den-
mark in closing its
doors to Austrian
Jews. Several Jews
are expelled from Ice-
land as Icelanders’ at-
titudes grow increas-
ingly hostile toward
Jews settled here.
The Aid Association of
German Jews concludes
that refuge in Iceland
from Nazi Germany is im-
possible.
The first Jewish con-
gregation is estab-
lished in Iceland. Jew-
ish soldiers among
the British forces
practice the first non-
Christian religious
ceremony in Iceland
in 940 years.
More Jews, includ-
ing a rabbi, arrive
to Iceland with the
American forces.
Iceland becomes
independent. 2,000
Jewish soldiers are
stationed in Ice-
land. 500 Jews are
present at a Rosh
Hashanah service
at the Naval Air
Station Keflavik.
Nine Jews reside in Ice-
land, according to Ice-
land’s Statistics Bureau.
Iceland votes in favour of
the Partition Plan at the
United Nations. The plan
is widely perceived as a
boon for Israel.
Jewish author and jour-
nalist Alfred Joachim
Fischer visits Iceland. He
notes that almost all Jews
settled in Iceland have
taken Icelandic names.
President Ólafur Ragnar Grímsson
marries Dorrit Moussaieff. Dorrit,
though secular, was born in Jerusalem
to a wealthy Bukharian Jewish family.
She is credited with bringing positive
publicity to Iceland’s Jewry, though
the community says she maintains her
distance from them.
Rabbi Berel Pewzner of
the Orthodox Jewish orga-
nization Chabad presides
over a Passover Seder in
Reykjavík. Over 50 attend,
and he is encouraged to
return for more services in
September.
Je
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“The funny thing is, there’s a building here
built by a Jew, and it would be the perfect
place,” Mike says, referring to the Jacobsen
building on Austurstræti, built in the early
20th century by the Jewish trading agent
Fritz Heymann Nathan. “What I would love
to do is get the second floor of that building,
somewhere above the Laundromat Café,” a
space currently occupied by a restaurant.
But if procured, a synagogue in a space
like this—right in the heart of 101—brings
other questions to mind. Namely, how does
the Jewish community expect Iceland’s pub-
lic to react to such a development?
One has only to think of the Islamic
community’s struggle to build a mosque to
gauge the recalcitrance with which foreign
religious institutions are granted shape in
Iceland. In 2000, the Muslim Association ap-
plied to build a mosque in Reykjavík. Only
after more than a decade of waiting in si-
lent bafflement has the Association received
from the city the land it requested.
“There’s conflict between the two groups
[Sunni and Shiite Muslims], which is sup-
posed to be the reason there’s no mosque
there. There are over 600 Muslims here, why
no mosque? It seems very strange to me,”
Mike says. The Muslims in the Muslim As-
sociation continue to worship, in a chapel on
the third floor of an office building at Ármúli
38, which is safely outside of the city’s cul-
tural core.
“The chapel today is not making a state-
ment—nothing like the huge building they
wanted placed downtown,” Mike says. Ob-
serving the Muslim Associations efforts,
Mike says, he feels compelled to think,
“What if this was me and I was looking for a
place to make a synagogue?”
Mike concedes that the obstacles the
Muslim Association faces are probably simi-
lar to what the Jewish community would
face, but he notes that the Jewish commu-
nity’s modest bank account would be com-
pletely unable to finance projects on the
scale of the Muslim Association’s.
But what if, against all odds, the money
was raised—perhaps by foreign Jewish or-
ganisations or untapped donors with gen-
erous pocketbooks? Beside finances, what
opposition to a synagogue has the Jewish
community run into, in concrete terms?
“The sad truth is we’ve never really ap-
plied for state recognition. There probably
aren’t enough community members willing
to go in and self-identify,” Mike says, refer-
ring to the 50 members of a religious organ-
isation whose signatures are required on the
application for state recognition and the at-
tendant financial aid.
Mike believes that the Jewish community
could win the designation with a delega-
tion numbering far less, but even rallying a
smaller group could be difficult.
“What I’ve been waiting for is a core of
15–20 people, or a grassroots group. I don’t
want to do this by myself,” Mike says. And at
this moment, the layers of self-abnegation
drop from his guard. The contradictions he’s
sprinkled in; the denials that he’s a com-
munity leader in any way, or has been since
arriving to Iceland in 1986; the portrait he
desperately wants to portray of himself as
non-essential to the organisation of the
Jewish community, even while constructing
their Torah ark and running their services all
these years—all of it evaporates in this mo-
ment, into the wind lashing the glass win-
dows outside Kaffitár.
“I don’t want to do this by myself,” he says
again—a man who has expended so much on
the community’s behalf in the quarter cen-
tury he’s been here.
But is that what it feels like? That the
synagogue—a glass ceiling for the small
community—can’t be breached because the
nucleus of the community doesn’t extend
beyond a single person?
“That’s how it’s felt for me. Well, for me
and one other woman,” Mike says.
THE TATTERED DREAM COAT
Sigal Har-Meshi, the community’s treasurer,
tentatively agreed to meet with me at Café
Babalú only because Mike, in the previ-
ous interview, had an opportunity to vet me
against the legion of reporters he’s met with
representing Iceland’s other publications—a
legion for whom Mike is the token Jewish
voice in articles, and to whom Mike, after
frustrations with the simplifications of jour-
nalism, has decided to stop talking. Some-
how in our meeting I pronounced the shib-
boleth, and he agreed to open Sigal’s node
of the community phone tree to me.
Sigal was born in Israel and lived there
until deciding, in the midst of extensive trav-
el, to work a stint in an Icelandic fish factory
with her sister. They both married Icelandic
men, and since then, Sigal has raised three
children at different lengths in both Iceland
and Israel.
Silences often fell between us. Much of
the time I felt that Sigal was not in my com-
pany at all, nor I in hers. Sometimes she only
fixed me with the mild, half-focused gaze of a
dreamer, and although she spoke of so much
happiness—a year ago, in the same café,
they held an informal Hanukkah celebration
and were now preparing for another—there
was in this look something witheringly sad
and lost. And she was still afraid: afraid that
some Icelander might recognise the Jewish
symbols with which she imbues her jewel-
lery, afraid of being photographed for this
article, afraid of speaking openly about her
culture with her children’s classmates and
with her own Icelandic relatives.
“The synagogue? That’s Mike’s dream,”
Sigal Har-Meshi says. “All I want is a Jewish
funeral for myself,” she says, referencing the
open-air ceremony which trades stones for
flowers as tribute to the dead, and which, to
date, has never been performed in Iceland.
The year 2011 was, by all accounts, a his-
toric year for Jews in Iceland. In the spring,
the Orthodox Jewish organisation Chabad
made clear its interest in developing the
Jewish community here, sending Rabbi Ber-
el Pewzner as its emissary to preside over
the first kosher Passover Seder ever held in
Iceland.
More than 50 people showed up for the
service. The rabbi decided to return for the
High Holy Days in the fall. They were the first
formal services with a rabbi and kosher To-
rah scroll held in the city since World War
II, when U.S. soldiers observed the holidays,
even as Iceland followed other European na-
tions in suit, denying German Jews sanctu-
ary in Iceland.
In 2012, the rabbi came back and again
presided over services. He insists on enthu-
siasm:
“We are now going through a very exciting
stage of community building, with monthly
meetings and children’s programmes, and
hopefully we will have a synagogue and a
permanent Jewish community centre in the
very near future,” he said in an email to the
Grapevine.
And yet, it is telling that when Mike
mentioned feeling alone in his struggle,
along with one other person, that that per-
son was not Rabbi Berel Pewzner. It is tell-
ing that, when rabbis in strict adherence to
kosher principles and decorum in services
set their sights on a small community, the
former leader of those services is displaced.
It is further telling that, of the hundred or
so Jews in Iceland—from the Argentinean
coral researchers to the Venezuelan videog-
raphers, from the president of the Icelandic
Ethical Humanist Association to the handful
of Jewish musicians here, not a single one is,
like the rabbi, an Orthodox Jew, though none
strictly oppose him.
“When the rabbi came, it was interesting
to see how the services were performed, to
see more culture,” Sigal says. “But the truth
is that the Jewish community in Iceland isn’t
very religious.”
There’s no escaping the fact that most of
the Jews in Iceland come from secular back-
grounds, and while they may be interested in
occasionally meeting foreigners with similar
cultural backgrounds and having their kids
discover their ethnic Jewish roots, the com-
munity’s identity may not, in the end, lie in
religion. The decision of Jews in Iceland not
to push for a synagogue may not be coward-
ice, but honesty.
NODULES IN THE TREE
The community found in Mike the leader it
needed. Not someone who could carry out
the services perfectly, or someone insistent
on a kosher Torah as opposed to a paper one,
but someone who takes symbolic construc-
tions like the ark for that paper Torah into
his own hands, someone who can be their
broker when the rabbi shows up and tell him
that instead of kosher meals for services,
they’d rather partake in an informal potluck.
With a synagogue, a more rigid hierarchy
would replace skeletal phone trees and the
same services Mike now cherishes might be-
come alienating once more, as they were for
him in Vienna. With a synagogue comes the
question of who would lead those services,
for it is a task for which Mike is not qualified,
in the strictest sense. Indeed, when faced
with the choice of presiding over a formal
service like a Jewish wedding, Mike’s anxi-
ety about his floating position has led him to
decline the honour.
But still, though he’s served his commu-
nity plenty, served it perhaps as much as it
wants him to, there remains his unquenched
ambition and his dream. There remains the
impulse of the frontiersman to clear a path
and break new ground.
Looking at the new generation of Jews
in Iceland, and especially his own children,
who were his most cherished reason for be-
coming involved in the first place, he can’t
help but feel like the seeds he’s tried so hard
to plant have either fallen on rocky soil, or
weren’t the seeds he thought he’d planted all
along.
“Why is there a synagogue in Oslo? Why
are there synagogues in Copenhagen?
There should’ve been one a long time ago,
but there’s something that’s working against
it,” he says.
Within days of our interview, Mike de-
cided that my own study of the Jewish com-
munity was counter to its aims. In a zealous
push, convinced that any press was bad
press in a state where Jews are often misun-
derstood, he refused to let us take his photo.
After much coaxing, he finally agreed to it
an hour before print, but said he had a bad
feeling about it.
In the summer, Mike will return with
other community members to tend a plot of
trees and new seedlings in Heiðmörk forest.
They’ll pour mulch and clean a picnic table
that is publicly used.
“Our plot doesn’t have the biggest trees,”
he said to me. “But some of them were plant-
ed before I came here, over 25 years ago.”
But the truth is
that the Jewish
community in
Iceland isn’t very
religious.
“
„
That’s one of the
most important
reasons for me to
participate—so that
my kids can experi-
ence first-hand my
own religion.
“
„