Europe’s smallest Jewish community opens a permanent synagogue

Rabbi Avraham Feldman and his wife, Mushky, established Iceland’s first permanent Chabad-Lubavitch presence after moving from the US in 2018.

Rabbi Feldman said: “Jews here were yearning for a synagogue, for a rabbi, and some sort of a community. It has been amazing to fill that need.”

Jewish life in Iceland has historically been small and scattered. Although Jewish traders are believed to have passed through the island as early as the 1600s, organised communal life only emerged in the late 19th century. For decades, Jews met in rented venues or borrowed spaces, including the basement of Reykjavik’s Hallgrímskirkja church.

Today, Iceland’s Jewish population is estimated at around 300 people out of a national population of about 400,000.

Rabbi Avraham Feldman, Chabad of Iceland (Credit: Instagram)[Missing Credit]

The centre will also house a permanent exhibition documenting more than a century of Jewish life in Iceland, including prayer books donated by some of the island’s earliest Jewish residents.

Like many Jewish institutions across Europe, the building will operate with security measures in place, with access generally limited to members and visitors who arrange their attendance in advance.

Michael Klein, an American who has lived in Iceland since 2020, said the new centre would benefit both residents and Jewish visitors.

“Iceland has a highly diverse, dispersed and diffused Jewish community; given that we’re an isolated island, we all kind of washed up here,” he said.

“The Feldmans managed to pull together the resources, the building and the work to turn a disused political party headquarters and restaurant into a Jewish centre that can serve not only our small community but the far larger group of visitors from all over the Jewish world who come for our natural beauty and peaceful isolation.”