Every year Norway’s Chief Rabbi Michael Melchior boards a plane in Israel and takes the transcontinental trip to Oslo for High Holy Day services.
The rabbi, who is also the Israeli deputy minister of education, culture and sport, leads 150 congregants
in prayer. One of those congregants is Jo Benkow, the former president of the Norwegian parliament.
In a country of only 1,500 Jews, Benkow represents the Jewish minority as one of the nation’s most prominent leaders. He has more than 50 years of political and public service experience.
Benkow was in the Bay Area to give the introductory remarks earlier this month at the opening of the exhibit “Jewish Life and Culture in Norway: Wergeland’s Legacy” on display at U.C. Berkeley.
Despite recent Norwegian media accusations that the country has adopted an oppositional stance to Israel, Benkow describes Jewish life in Norway as “harmonious.” He says that neither the Norwegian media (which he calls “twisted and one-sided”) — nor Europe in general — accurately represent the Norwegian people.
“Europe today is absolutely hopeless and ungrateful in its strained attitude toward the U.S. and Israel,” he says. “My view is that it is much too critical.”
He explains that as a small country Norway often sees itself as an underdog, and is often sympathetic to other peiceified underdogs, such as Palestine.
Several years ago, he says, a Norwegian trade union leader tried to impose a boycott on Israeli products, but received little support — not even from her own organization.
Benkow pointed out that in peacetime Norwegians may have trouble understanding war-torn Israel. But, he says, his nation shouldn’t forget its own troubled past. “They seem to have forgotten their own background.”
Benkow remembers Norway’s background all too well. In Nazi-occupied Norway, all of the women in his family, including his mother, were gassed to death at Auschwitz.
The young Benkow fled to Sweden and then to a British air force training camp in Canada. He was a pilot and second lieutenant in the Royal Norwegian Air Force.
His father and brother survived, and he returned home Aug. 17, 1945. He entered politics four years later. Recently retired at 80, he travels the world giving speeches and lectures with his wife of 20 years, an ex-parliamentarian.
At the exhibition opening, he discussed the history of an “anti-Jewish” clause in the Norwegian constitution.
Benkow says the clause, which was repealed in 1851, was less about denying the Jewish religion and more about succumbing to ignorant prejudice.
“They’d never seen a living breathing Jew in their life, but they’d listen to stories and prejudice,” he says.
He describes the early Jewish Norwegians as “law abiding and diligent,” and people who “kept a low profile.”
Like Jews throughout Europe they suffered greatly during the Holocaust. Restitution came 50 years later.
“It was non-Jewish Norwegian people in the press and parliament that discovered what had really happened to all the Jewish property and that nothing was left — socially, culturally and economically wiped out.
“They saw it as a moral obligation to do amends. They had to do it in financial terms because there was no other way.”
The reparations have supported Jews worldwide. Benkow points to the funding of schooling for Ethiopian Jews as one of the projects he greatly supports.