Norway religions: Judaism
Judaism has been the most repressed religion in Norway. The Constitution of 1814 barred Jews from the country. 1845’s ‘Nonconformist Law’ granted religious freedom to Christian faiths but not non-Christian ones. For Jews, the constitutional ban remained in force six more years until it was rescinded in 1851.
Published on Sunday, 16th June, 2013 at 08:20 by M. Michael Brady.
Last Updated on 16th June 2013 at 08:50.
The first Jew, Abraham Vollman from Germany’s Lübeck, settled in Christiania (Oslo) in 1852 and opened a shop. In 1891, the country’s first nonconformist congregation, the Mosaiske Trossamfund (‘The Mosaic Community’) was founded in Oslo. The Jewish population then grew slowly to about 1,800 in 1940, the time of the German invasion.
In 1942, occupying Germans required that Jews be sent to concentration camps. The collaborationist government complied. (The King and Parliament had fled to England and comprised the true government in exile during the war). It willingly participated in the Holocaust by deporting some 770 Jews, of whom 758 were killed in death camps.
One of those killed was Ruth Maier, who in 1939 had fled from her native Vienna, only to be arrested in November 1942 and deported to Auschwitz. She left diaries and letters, which in 2007 were transcribed by poet Jan Erik Vold and published in book form: ‘Ruth Maiers Dagbok’, which subsequently was translated into English under the title ‘Ruth Maier’s Diary’.
The attitudes of the general public could hardly have differed more. The Norwegian home front successfully smuggled 900 Jews across the Swedish border to safety during WWII. In Trondheim, the Methodist congregation gave Jews a place to secretly worship after their synagogue was occupied, and hid the Jewish congregation’s books and papers throughout the occupation.
http://theforeigner.no/pages/columns/norway-religions-judaism/
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