Rabbi Avraham Feldman stands in front of an erupting volcano, reciting a blessing.
Located an hour outside of Iceland's capital city, Reykjavík, Fagradalsfjall spews orange lava like a pot of boiling water left too long on the stove. Rivers of molten magma ooze through crevices in the black igneous rock, blanketing the surrounding valley as clouds of steam and ash dissipate into the air.
As the volcano gurgles behind him, Feldman casually holds up his phone to film a short video. With his eyes squinting into the sun from behind wire-framed glasses, he slowly and patiently explains the meaning of the blessing's Hebrew words.
"This makes us stop and think about this unbelievable creation, this beautiful world that we live in, and we think about the artist who created all of it," he says. "So we make a blessing together, and this blessing is about God's power and God's strength, and we see this and we feel this even more when we see a sight like this."
Inside Europe's smallest Jewish community
Reciting blessings over volcanoes is one of many unconventional rhythms of Jewish life in the land of fire and ice.
Feldman is Iceland's sole rabbi, the leader of Europe's smallest Jewish community. There are about 300 Jews in a country of about 354,000 people — or .08% of Iceland's population. Despite the country's complicated Jewish history, homogeneous religious makeup, and rising incidents of global antisemitism, Iceland's small Jewish presence continues to thrive.
Feldman, 32, his wife, Mushky, 31, and their children are members of the Chabad sect of Hasidic Judaism, a movement focused on Jewish outreach popularized by the late Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson (known as "the Rebbe"). They are one of 4,900 Chabad emissary families who run Jewish institutions worldwide, Chabad's official website says. Mushky grew up in Gothenburg, Sweden, where her parents founded the first Nordic Chabad house in the 1990s, while Feldman hails from Brooklyn, New York.
A year after the Feldmans married in Sweden in 2014, they moved to Berlin to lead a Jewish student center. But they kept hearing about Iceland. Intrigued by the small Jewish community that had never had a rabbi or a synagogue, they visited for the first time in 2017, the year tourism in the country peaked. After several trips, they decided to make it their home a year later and establish a center for Jewish life in Reykjavík.
"It used to be unheard of for an observant Jew to leave the Jewish community and go to a place where there is no Jewish infrastructure, but the Rebbe empowered people to create whatever Jewish infrastructure is needed," Feldman told Insider. "So instead of looking at the negative — how you're missing this, and it's missing that — the Rebbe taught us how to look at the opportunity, look at what we could create, and look at how many people will have the opportunity to celebrate Yiddishkeit," a Yiddish word that literally means Jewishness, "once it's available to them."
As the only rabbi in the country, Feldman is something of a celebrity. Wearing a full beard, a black skullcap, and the traditional knotted fringe called a tzitzit, he often gets recognized in public. Universities invite him to speak about Judaism. Local media interview him about his religious lifestyle and ask for his take on topics like Netflix's portrayal of Hasidic Jews in the 2020 miniseries "Unorthodox." In January, a letter simply addressed to the "Leader of the Jewish Community, Reykjavík, Iceland," managed to reach the Feldmans' home, where they hold some of their programming since Iceland does not yet have a synagogue.
Guests at the Feldmans' Friday night Shabbat meals — a mix of locals and tourists who reach out through Chabad of Iceland's website — stay up late to dine in the soft, dusky glow of the midnight sun.
Shabbat, the Jewish day of rest, starts at sundown on Friday, and in Iceland begins close to midnight during the summer months, when the sun never fully sets. Silver candlesticks lit at the start of Shabbat adorn tables spread with Icelandic delicacies like fresh-caught salmon and kosher meat imported from Paris in huge frozen shipments.
Havdalah, a ritual marking the end of Shabbat after sundown on Saturday, is performed around 1:30 a.m. on Sunday at the height of the summer. When havdalah comes a bit earlier toward the end of summer — say 10:30 p.m. on Saturday — community members and visitors occasionally come over to listen to Feldman chant the closing blessings over a cup of wine and pass around fragrant spices to infuse the coming week with sweetness."Sometimes I wake up in the morning and I think to myself, 'Oh my God, I'm living on a rock in the middle of the North Atlantic,'" Feldman said. "But Iceland is a really amazing place."
A community hundreds of years in the making
Iceland's Jewish community was born despite antisemitic sentiments dating back centuries.
Beginning in the 17th century, Jews were only "occasional visitors" to Iceland, mostly merchants traveling for business, the historian Vilhjálmur Örn Vilhjálmsson wrote in the Jewish Political Studies Review. By 1853, when Iceland was still under Danish rule, the Icelandic parliament rejected King Frederick VII of Denmark's request to implement a Danish law allowing "the access for foreign Jews to reside here in the State."
It wasn't until the 1930s that European Jews fleeing Nazi persecution established a more permanent but still tenuous presence on the craggy island country. While some Jewish refugees managed to stay by marrying Icelanders, Vilhjálmsson wrote that others were expelled due to antisemitic sentiments or deported because they did not have local sponsors to secure the necessary residence permits.
In 1937, a Danish diplomat, C.A.C. Brun, met with Iceland's prime minister to discuss the case of the Rottbergers, a Jewish family on the verge of expulsion after an Icelandic leatherworker claimed they were stealing business from his leather market.
"Iceland has always been a pure Nordic country, free of Jews, and those who have entered in the last years must leave — but: Rottberger can get a respite until spring to complete his affairs," Brun later wrote, summarizing the meeting in his diary.
Hope Knútsson, 80, met some of the Jewish refugees who had settled in Iceland. An occupational therapist from New York, who identifies as "first and foremost a humanist, and secondly ethnically Jewish," she married an Icelander and has lived there since 1974."They told us about others who had tried to come and were turned away and ended up in death camps," she said. "Some of them wanted a Jewish burial, and everyone in the group said, 'We'll do what we can to make sure that happens.' All of those people are gone now."
Decades before the Feldmans brought Chabad to Iceland, Knútsson helped organize gatherings for Iceland's mostly secular Jewish population in the 1980s and 1990s. The hodgepodge group of elders, expats, and families — usually between 20 and 40 people — met occasionally for lecture series and potluck dinners about Jewish holidays. Those meetings alternated between a now-defunct community center and the basement of Hallgrimskirkja church, a towering concrete building in downtown Reykjavík that remains one of Iceland's most recognizable landmarks.
"There was just this tiny handful of people, and none of us were particularly religious," she said. "Because we all had young kids, we decided to gather a few times a year, have a potluck dinner, and tell the stories to the kids about their Jewish roots. Around Hanukkah, my husband, the Icelander, fried potato latkes for hours."
A commitment to thrive despite antisemitism
Reports of antisemitic incidents in Europe, including online harassment, vandalism, and physical assaults, hit record highs in 2021, a 2022 study by the Center for the Study of Contemporary European Jewry at Tel Aviv University found. A 2022 US State Department report about religious freedom in Iceland noted a "slight uptick in antisemitic rhetoric on social media, and one incident involving a verbal confrontation" in May 2021, during a period of escalating violence in Israel and Gaza. And this year, a report by the Anti-Defamation League found that roughly one in four residents of the 10 European countries surveyed held anti-Jewish beliefs, leading the organization to conclude that antisemitism remains "deeply entrenched across Europe."
Despite the rising rates of antisemitism, Feldman said that "99.9% of the time" he's had positive experiences with locals. But Knútsson still remembers an incident years earlier, when after her friend's son's bar mitzvah was featured on the local news, a swastika was scratched into the family's car. She also knew of a number of children who were bullied in school for being Jewish.
"I remember one in particular — and this was 25 or so years ago — when a mother called me up and said that the kids come running after her son, saying that Hitler should have killed his family," Knútsson said.
With the looming specter of antisemitism, Knútsson said she was initially worried when the Feldmans moved to Iceland and made headlines like "Cue the Hava Nagila: Iceland's First Rabbi Has Arrived.""I thought, oh, Icelanders are going to get the idea that all Jews dress like he does. And since there's already some antisemitic feelings here, I felt it was not so good," she said.
But Feldman and his family won people over.
"One very good friend of mine, who has Jewish roots, was in the hospital, and Mushky brought him wonderful foods every day," she said. "They go out of their way to do lovely things. You sort of can't not like them."
Iceland is still behind other nations in recognizing its Jewish history, which Feldman is working to change. In 2020, he helped organize Iceland's first Holocaust memorial service in Reykjavík, marking the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz at the Polish embassy. At the event, a violinist played a haunting Hasidic melody that, as Feldman told the crowd, was composed by a Polish cantor while traveling to the death camp of Treblinka in a cattle car. This year, Iceland's president, Guðni Th. Jóhannesson, was a featured speaker.
Feldman also spearheaded the effort to establish Judaism as an official religion in Iceland, a two-year process completed in 2021. The status allows life-cycle events such as Jewish weddings to be recognized by the government and entitles the community to a Jewish cemetery. Icelanders pay a religious tax to support a recognized religious group of their choosing, and the Jewish community can now receive those funds.
Even though 62.3% of Icelanders are registered members of Iceland's official state church, the Evangelical Lutheran Church, few actually consider themselves religious. A 2015 Gallup poll found that 30% of Icelanders at the time described themselves as "not a religious person," and 14% said they were "a convinced atheist."
About 1.1% of Icelanders are registered members of Siðmennt, the Icelandic Ethical Humanist Association founded by Knútsson in 1990. She said that religion isn't a large part of public life in Iceland precisely because there is a state church and, with it, an assumption of sameness that warrants little discussion.
"Iceland is one of the least religious countries on the planet despite the anachronism of having a state church," Knútsson said. "There is a joke that Icelanders go to church four times in their lives and they have to be carried in for two of those times."
Leading Judaism out from the margins
With support from Iceland's government and individual donors, the Feldmans are bringing Judaism out from the periphery.
In December 2018, six months after landing in Iceland, the Feldmans held the country's first-ever public Hanukkah menorah lighting in Reykjavík's city center. In attendance were the former Icelandic president Ólafur Ragnar Grímsson and the former first lady Dorrit Moussaieff, along with diplomats and community members. The practice has continued every year since with the support of the mayor and the city of Reykjavík.
But perhaps one of the most pivotal moments for Iceland's Jewish community came when a Swiss donor gifted them their very own Torah scroll in February 2020. A crucial component of synagogue services, a Torah scroll cannot simply be ordered online. A specially trained scribe spends a painstaking, yearlong effort writing all 304,805 Hebrew letters by hand.
To celebrate the milestone, the Feldmans hosted a traditional Torah inauguration ceremony known as a Hachnasat Sefer Torah. It began with a reception at the home of the US ambassador to Iceland, where community members took turns filling in the scroll's final Hebrew letters with a quill and ink.Feldman then carried the Torah, adorned by a navy velvet cover and silver crown ornaments, under a chuppah, the four-poled canopy used in Jewish weddings. As curious onlookers filmed the spectacle, the crowd sang and danced the sacred object past the colorful shops dotting Reykjavík's main street in an exuberant parade.
"Everyone was cheering it on," Feldman said. "It was really cool to see how people were enjoying it and showing support."
Feldman is now working on building the Torah a permanent home — Iceland's first synagogue housed in what will be the Jewish Center of Iceland. The historic project, which is in the early planning and fundraising stages, serves as another powerful symbol of the Jewish community's staying power."It's about just doing our part in making the world a brighter place, a better place, a kinder place, and giving every Jew who we get to know the opportunity to celebrate their heritage," Feldman said.
Such public displays of Judaism and the resources required to support them would have been unthinkable in Iceland a generation ago. With the larger threat of antisemitism across Europe, these acts still require a degree of courage.
In carving out spaces to worship in living rooms, embassies, and, yes, at the foot of erupting volcanoes, the Feldmans exhibit the determination that has sustained Jewish communities in many unlikely places for millennia.
When asked if he ever feels lonely as Iceland's only rabbi, living a Hasidic Jewish life in a country where Jews are a tiny minority, an ocean away from like-minded friends and family, Feldman paused.
"That's a great question," he said. But the answer is no. To him, Iceland's Jewish community is family.