West Norway recognizes first official Jewish organization since WWII
The new Bergen Jewish group has faced anti-Semitism from the press, according to some board members.
As international attention focused on Middle East High Holiday celebrations on the first Abraham Accords anniversary, 45 Jews gathered less conspicuously in west Norway to celebrate Rosh Hashanah collectively for the first time in 80 years.
The Jewish community in Bergen—Norway’s second largest city after capital Oslo and home to the picturesque UNESCO World Heritage Bryggen wharf site—was decimated during World War II, when Nazis murdered 750 of Norway’s 1,700 Jews. Bergen Jews created a new official organization, Det Jødiske Samfunn i Bergen, last year, and the city recognized it in December.
I spoke with five of the nine board members of the new group for an article in the Forward, titled “Decimated in the Holocaust, a Norwegian Jewish community revives.”
“Maybe we will be able to do something that has never been done here before, which maybe no one thought would be possible,” board member Alexandra Kimberly Bobrow told me. “I think this really gives hope to other communities that have been completely erased from the Holocaust—that you can bring Jewish life and culture back into a community.”
The article addresses some of the challenges the group has faced, as well as its leadership’s hopes for its future.