History of the Jews in Norway

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The synagogue in Oslo's Bergstien was inaugurated in 1920 (picture 2007)
The old Sofienberg Cemetery in Oslo (2005)
The poet Henrik Wergeland fought for the emancipation of the Jews in Norway.

The history of the Jews in Norway began in the second half of the 19th century. In 2012, between 1200 and 1500 Jews lived in the country, most of them in the capital Oslo . A smaller community exists in Trondheim ; their synagogue is one of the northernmost in the world.

history

The Jews in Denmark-Norway before 1814

A Jew is not mentioned in connection with Norway until the reign of Christian IV . The Jews in the empire were descendants of the Jews who were expelled from Spain by the Alhambra Edict in 1492 and from Portugal in 1498. These Sephardic Jews settled in the Netherlands, some also in Hamburg, but also in Denmark-Norway, where they were called "Portuguese Jews". Christian IV believed they could use his land. Due to the resistance of the clergy, they were settled in the duchies of Schleswig and Holstein, mainly in Glückstadt. In 1630 they were given the privilege to move freely in Denmark and Norway. In 1641 the king extended his protection to the European Ashkenazim . His successor Friedrich III. restricted freedom of travel for the Ashkenazim again. Now they had to carry a letter of safe conduct. However, this did not apply to the Sephardim in Glückstadt, because they had a documented privilege of freedom of travel. In 1657 freedom of travel was extended to all Sephardim. When the war against Sweden began at that time , the king needed capital. Ten years later, the king gave the rest of the Jews the same rights. The next king, Christian V , affirmed the rights of 1657 in an "open letter" of December 14, 1670. This letter played a certain role in the negotiations of the Storting of 1840 about the access of the Jews to Norway. In the 1670s, Jews were given permission to settle in certain Danish cities on application. In 1683, this only applied to Jews with a letter of passage, at the protest of the Sephardim for them. This freedom of settlement was overlooked in the corresponding law for Norway of 1687, with the result that many Jews in Norway were arrested in the following centuries. The provision was not in the provisions on the entry of foreigners, in which monks and Catholic clergy were threatened with the death penalty in the event of entry, but in Chapter 22, Third Book under the section on the treatment of Jews and the nomadic people . The officials were not sufficiently familiar with the regulations. It was not until 1750 that the special position of the Sephardim in Norway was made public again. Residence bans for Jews can be found in many letters of privilege for the cities of the empire from that time. Many letters of passage for Jews from the 17th and 18th centuries refer to both parts of the empire, even if their owners never visited Norway. The Jewish Taxeira family in Glückstadt was heavily involved in Norwegian mines. The Norwegian genealogical records show that around 1700 Jews married into Norwegian families, albeit after they were baptized. From the years before 1814 three Jews are known to have settled in Norway, albeit also after they had been baptized: Ludvig Mariboe , Edvard Isaach Hambro and the businessman Heinrich Glogau. Heinrich Glogau became known through a dispute with Christian Magnus Falsen about the planned § 2 (Jewish paragraph) of the constitution of 1814 in the press, which was supposed to prohibit Jews from entering Norway without exception. The ban violates the Christian-Protestant spirit of the constitution. On the other hand, Falsen advocated the ban on entry for Jews because, based on the experience of previous religious wars, he advocated that there should only be one religion in a state.

From 1814 to 1940

In 1814 Norway was separated from the personal union with Denmark: The Eidsvoll constitution provided for the Evangelical Lutheran denomination as the state religion , although religious freedom should initially be granted. Entry permits were no longer to be issued for Jews. They were expressly forbidden to stay in Article 2 of the constitution: Jews are completely excluded from entering the Reich. This also applied to visitors and travelers. Nonetheless, the constitution was considered one of the most liberal of its time.

See main article Der Judenparagraf

In 1832 the poet Henrik Wergeland campaigned for the rights of Jews for the first time . In 1839 he tried to get Parliament to abolish Article 2. In 1841 his commentary on the Jewish question appeared, in which he campaigned for tolerance . Wergeland died in 1845. Jews living in Sweden had a memorial erected for him in Stockholm. The inscription reads: Grateful Jews outside the Norwegian border erected this memorial in 1847. It was brought to Norway in 1849.

In 1851, the prohibition on entry for Jews was removed from the Norwegian constitution. Opponents spoke of an invasion of Jews that would now break into Norway. However, the number of Jewish residents remained small. In 1875 there were 34 people. In 1892 the first Jewish community was founded in Kristiania (now Oslo ). It had 136 members out of a total of 214 Norwegian Jews. Nathan Nachmann Nathan became the first headmaster . In 1882 it had the first synagogue.

Only after the Russian pogroms at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century did several Jews immigrate to Norway.

A Jewish cultural life developed v. a. in Oslo with theater groups, choirs and other cultural organizations.

Horror scenarios about an invasion of Jews into Norway were spread mainly from Russia after the First World War and from Germany after 1933 .

Anti-Semitism in Norway was latent and showed itself e.g. B. in a ban on shafts in 1929. The regulation is still in force today (as of 2012).

In 1938 and 1939, a few Jewish refugees came to Norway who were temporarily tolerated by the authorities while awaiting a visa for a third country.

Persecution (1940-1945)

»Jødisk forretning - Jewish enterprise«. Shield of the German occupation of Norway , 1940.
Anti-Jewish graffiti on a shop window in Oslo 1941

In April 1940, at the time of the German occupation of Norway , around 2,200 Jews were living in the country, of which around 300 were refugees from Germany, Austria or Czechoslovakia. There were two Jewish communities, one in Oslo and one in Trondheim .

On May 10, 1940, before the fighting in Norway was over, the Norwegian police were ordered by the German security police to confiscate the radios from Jews. The police carried out the seizure without objection.

The Norwegian Prime Minister Vidkun Quisling , appointed by the German occupiers, had all Jews recorded systematically in a nationwide questionnaire. Without this Norwegian contribution, it would have been difficult to capture so many people and then deport them. According to the information in the questionnaire, 1106 Jews were still living in Norway in the summer of 1941. At the Wannsee Conference on January 20, 1942, however, it was assumed that there were still 1,300 Jews in Norway.

Also on January 20, 1942, the newspapers asked the Jewish population to report to the police authorities. This request was largely followed by the Jewish population. Their ID cards were marked with a red "J". On March 12, 1942, Vidkun Quisling reinstated the 1814 ban on Jews from residing in the constitution. On October 7, 1942, one day after the state of emergency was imposed on Trondheim, all male Jews over the age of 15 were arrested there, while all women and children were interned in a few apartments in the city. The prisoners were taken to the Falstad German camp outside Trondheim.

On the weekend of 24./25. In October 1942 the Norwegian government drafted the " Law on the Confiscation of Jewish Property ", which came into force on Monday October 26th, in order to secure property and property of Jews from the German authorities. Also on October 26, 1942, the arrest of all male Jews over the age of 15 began with a "J" in their ID. The arrested were taken to the as yet unfinished Berg concentration camp , also known as "Quisling's chicken farm", outside the city of Tønsberg. In contrast to Falstad, Berg was subordinate to the Norwegian Ministry of Police. The women left behind were obliged to report to the police every day. They were also arrested on November 24th.

On the afternoon of November 26, 1942, the Danube left the port of Oslo with 532 Jews on board. The transport continued via Stettin by train to the Auschwitz concentration and extermination camp . He arrived there on December 1st. Of those arriving, 186 men were taken as prisoners, the other 346 people, including all women and children, were sent directly to the gas chambers . On February 24, 1943, 158 Jews - 71 women, 62 men, 25 children - were transported by ship from Norway via Stettin and Berlin to the Auschwitz concentration and extermination camp , where they arrived on the night of March 3.

With these two large and other smaller transports, depending on the source, a total of 767 or 771 people, more than a third of all Norwegian Jews, were deported. Of these, only 26. Around 1000 were able to flee to Sweden , a few escaped to Great Britain or hid in the country.

During the occupation, Jewish Norwegians found support from resistance groups and from individuals such as the student Hans Christen Mamen . He brought 25 Jewish children to safety across the border into Sweden. He got help from the theologian Ole Hallesby . 41 Norwegians were awarded the title Righteous Among the Nations by the Yad Vashem Memorial for their work in saving persecuted Jews .

The deportation was organized by the police chief in Oslo, Knut Rød . He was acquitted on April 9, 1948 by the Norwegian Court of Justice of the charge of collaboration with the German occupying forces. In the verdict it was said: All along he has pursued his plan to harm the enemy and to benefit his compatriots. Rød continued his service in the police force until he retired in 1965. He died in 1986.

After the Second World War

The synagogue in Oslo was preserved undamaged because the occupiers had set up a museum depot for cult objects and the like there. This enabled the congregation to hold church services and lessons there again from 1945.

During the Hungarian People's Uprising of 1956, the government allowed immigration of Jews from Hungary . In addition to Oslo, a Jewish community that still exists today developed in Trondheim . They are orthodox and support emigration to Israel.

In the 1990s, the responsibility of the Norwegian authorities in the deportations of Norwegian Jews during the German occupation and the handling of confiscated Jewish property became increasingly debated. In January 1996, the World Jewish Congress asked Norway to come to terms with its history in this regard. In the summer of 1997, an appointed government commission presented a report which two years later led to parliament approving compensation of 450 million kroner. The money was used for individual compensation and to set up the Center for Holocaust and Minority Studies.

In the 21st century

Quisling's former residence Villa Grande now houses a Holocaust research center.

In 2003 the writer Espen Søbye published a book about the life of 15-year-old Kathe Lasnik, 60 years after her deportation. There is little information about Kathe Lasnik. She had filled out Vidkun Quisling's questionnaire , which Søbye discovered in the Central Statistical Bureau. One of her entries caught his eye and became the title of the book Kathe - alltid vært i Norge ("Kathe - always been in Norway"). Søbye is one of the few authors who has taken up the Norwegian silence about the persecution in literary terms.

On August 24, 2006, a Norwegian Study Center for Holocaust and Religious Minorities ( Senter for studier av Holocaust og livssynsminoriteter , HL-senteret for short ) was opened. It is based in Oslo's Villa Grande , where Vidkun Quisling lived from 1941 to 1945. In front of the villa there was a statue of Knut Rød, the former police chief of Oslo, in uniform with his arm raised in a Hitler salute, as a provocation to the public. He organized the deportations. The statue was not to be removed until his April 9, 1948 acquittal was overturned.

A demonstration against the Israeli military operation in the Gaza Strip led by the Norwegian finance minister and other important leftists , which took place in Oslo in 2009, was also attended by many young Arabs who chanted Itbah al yahud! - Kill the Jews!

Demographics

year 1875 1940 1941 1946 1980 1995 2007
Total population 1,796,752 2,963,909 2,982,224 3,107,269 4,078,900 4,348,410 4,681,134
Jews 34 2200 1300 556 900 1200 1200
proportion of <0.002% 0.07% 0.04% 0.02% 0.02% 0.03% 0.03%

Chief Rabbi

The list contains a list of the chief rabbis of Finland: → States in Europe under Norway

people

Persons of Norwegian Jewish descent or Jewish persons with a connection to Norway are:

  • Jo Benkow, President of the Storting 1985–1993

  • Rabbi Michael Melchior

  • Synagogue in Trondheim 1995

See also

literature

  • Samuel Abrahamsen: Norway's response to the Holocaust. (A historical perspective). Holocaust Library, New York NY 1991, ISBN 0-89604-117-4 .
  • Tôviyyā [Towiah] Friedman (ed.): Document collection on "The deportation of the Jews from Norway to Auschwitz". 2nd Edition. Institute of Documentation in Israel for the Investigation of Nazi War Crimes, Haifa 1994.
  • Per Ole Johansen: Oss selv nærmest. Norge og jødene 1914–1943. Gyldendal, Oslo 1984, ISBN 82-05-15062-1 .
  • Oskar Mendelsohn: Jødenes historie i Norge. Gjennom 300 år. 2 volumes. Universitets-Forlaget, Oslo et al. 1987.
  • Oskar Mendelsohn: Jødene i Norge.Historien om en minoritet . Universitets-Forlaget, Oslo et al. 1992.
  • Espen Søbye: Kathe - deported from Norway . From the Norwegian by Uwe Englert. Association A, Berlin 2008, ISBN 978-3-935936-70-5 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Synagogues at extreme latitudes ( Memento of the original from March 31, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. Alnakka.net, accessed November 5, 2012. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / alnakka.net
  2. ↑ Mendelsohn (1992) p. 9.
  3. ↑ Mendelsohn (1992) p. 10.
  4. ↑ Mendelsohn (1992) p. 11.
  5. ↑ Mendelsohn (1992) p. 12 f.
  6. ^ Oskar Mendelsohn, Vol. 1, p. 364.
  7. ↑ Per Anders Johansen: Reagerer sterkt på holdninger til jøder. on: aftenposten.no , October 21, 2012.
  8. ↑ Per Ole Johansen: Oss selv nærmest. P. 136 f.
  9. ↑ Cf. Ulrich Brömmling: Das Verbotene Land. In: The time . Edition 35/2007 of 23 August 2007, p. 74.
  10. ^ Susanne Maerz: Treason versus Resistance. Stations and problems of "coming to terms with the past" in Norway. In: Northern Europe Forum. (2005: 2), pp. 43-73.
  11. ↑ Most Norwegian Jews react with fear. In Alex Feuerherdt : Lizas Welt.de, August 11, 2011, accessed on August 4, 2018.
  12. ↑ Historical statistics: Population Statistics Norway , accessed October 27, 2012.
  13. ↑ Sources for 1941: number from the Wannsee Conference on January 20, 1942; 1980: World Jewish Population, 1983 edition, accessed February 14, 2012 (PDF) ; 2007: American Jewish Yearbook 2008, accessed November 5, 2012 (online)