copenhagen | In the center of this European capital, just a few minutes’ walk from parliament and other institutions of Danish authority, sits the quasi-autonomous community of Christiania.
Most of the literature describes it as a hippie commune, and that’s more or less accurate. Streets are unpaved, buildings are covered in colorful artwork and surprises seem to lie behind every corner, such as this actual sight: a young girl in a fluorescent yellow vest riding a pony.
Along “Pusher Street” — a cobbled thoroughfare that actually shows up on Google Maps — marijuana is sold nearly as openly as it is in Amsterdam. Several vendors sell varieties of hash and pot from small white plastic jars. Around the corner, a café boasts that it is the “safest in the world,” thanks to 6,000 armed police inspections in the past five years.
Rabbi Bent LexnerAs with all experiments in utopia, time and the encroachment of commercialism have somewhat diluted Christiania’s once idealistic raison d’etre. There have been sporadic acts of violence in the recent past, and the drug trade has attracted dealing and delinquency. Yet the place still stands as something of a testament to Danish free-spiritedness and progressivism.
It is that same spirit that animates one of the central narratives of Danish Jewish history: the rescue of some 8,000 Jews — nearly all of Denmark’s Jewish population — in 1943.
The Jews were spirited away to Sweden over several weeks in October where, for the next 22 months, they were sheltered from the Nazi storm. In stark contrast to what transpired elsewhere in Europe, nearly all Denmark’s Jews survived the onslaught. Or so the story goes.
Like many Holocaust narratives, this one has been subjected to some degree of revisionism in recent years. Danes profited more significantly, and were subject to considerably less risk, than the popular story would have us believe.
According to a document prepared by Sofie Lene Bak, a historian at the modest Danish Jewish Museum, families paid as much as 50,000 kroner for their passage to safety — a sum equal to about $200,000 in today’s currency.
Though the whole story doesn’t paint the Danes in quite as positive a light as the original version, the fact remains that Denmark’s Jews fared far better than their coreligionists elsewhere in Europe.
Nowadays, Danish Jews can barely spare a soul; only about 2,000 are members of the Jewish community. And depending on how you count, there are perhaps as many as 8,000 or 10,000 more. No one really knows.
Bent Lexner, Denmark’s chief rabbi since 1996, is one of them. He lives in a row of modest but stately apartments overlooking Osterport Station in the eastern part of Copenhagen.
Lexner ministers to a population well integrated into one of the world’s most secular cultures, a group that overwhelmingly does not share his Orthodox practice and has a high rate of intermarriage.
This has led Lexner to adopt a more pragmatic posture than many of his Orthodox colleagues. He counsels couples facing the prospect of an intermarried son or daughter not to pressure too much, not to cut ties and certainly not to sit shiva if the marriage goes ahead.
Children are admitted to the Jewish day school even if they are not halachically Jewish, though the expectation is that eventually a conversion will take place under Orthodox auspices.
Is the conversion obligatory?
“You’re in Denmark. We don’t have requirements,” said Finn Schwarz, the Jewish community president. “We have a common understanding.”
Denmark’s Jews are disappearing — perhaps not entirely, not as individuals. But as a distinct religious subgroup, it’s increasingly hard to see how the community can persist much longer in anything other than a highly truncated form.
In the middle decades of the 20th century, the community had about twice as many members as it has now. Lexner predicts that in 50 years the community will be “very, very small,” and really more of a “friendship club” than a religious community.
Unlike almost all other European countries, Denmark has been remarkably welcoming and protective of its Jewish minority. But that degree of openness has exacted its price, and the consequence may be the dissolution of a community with nearly 400 years of history.
One gets a sense of some of that history at the Danish Jewish Museum, designed by famed architect Daniel Libeskind only a few years after he designed the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco.
The museum tells the story of a community embracing its Danishness even as it absorbed successive waves of immigrants fleeing oppression in the former Soviet Union.
Absent those waves, Lexner’s “friendship club” would likely have already come to pass.
Even Arne Melchior sees the writing on the wall.
A seventh-generation Dane and the elder statesman of Denmark’s most prominent Jewish family, the 85-year-old Melchior brags that his grandchildren are the ninth generation of observant Jewish Melchiors in Denmark.
His father and brother served as chief rabbis, and his nephew Michael is a member of Israel’s Knesset. Arne himself was a minister in two Danish governments and served in parliament for more than 25 years.
But in 20 to 30 years, he predicts, the community won’t be able to support two rabbis or a cantor any longer. He also predicts that the Great Synagogue, located just off one of the main shopping streets in the city center, down a small winding lane, will soon no longer be able to support a choir.
He even worries about the fate of Denmark’s 200-year-old Jewish school, especially if the state stops covering 85 percent of its students’ tuition.
The Danish lesson seems to be this: In a peaceful, prosperous, tolerant, stable, democratic, liberal, bike-loving country — absent throngs of other Jews — Jewish life will wither.
This article was adapted from Ben Harris’ blog: blogs.jta.org/wanderingjew.