Jewish Geography
Community. “We are on the out- skirts of the Jewish world.... You will probably not find a commu- nity like ours any other place in the world.” With a population of about 200,000, Trondheim is Nor- way’s third-largest city, behind Oslo and Bergen. Located on the shores of a fjord that’s an inlet in the Norwegian Sea, the city was founded in the year 997 and was Norway’s capital during the Viking Age. The unlikely story of Jewish life in Trondheim be- gan in the late nineteenth cen- tury, when Jewish immigrants began arriving from Poland and Lithuania, usually because they couldn’t afford to go to Ameri- ca. By 1900, there were more than 100 Jews living in Trond- heim and the city’s first syna- gogue was established. During the next 20 years, the communi- ty grew to more than 300 mem- bers, prompting the need for a larger synagogue. In 1923, an old railway sta- tion at Arkitekt Christies gate 1 was purchased with the financial support of approximately 200 Jews from Oslo and converted into a synagogue. It was inaugu- rated in 1925 and remains, along with the synagogue in Oslo, one of only two synagogues in the country. Germany occupied Norway from 1940 to 1945. The Nazis confiscated the synagogue and used it as a barracks, replacing the Stars of David in the win- dows with swastikas. It’s be- lieved that 165 local Jews, about half of Trondheim’s Jewish pop- ulation at the time, died in the Holocaust, fuelled by robust col- laboration by local authorities.
Today, Moen estimates there are 200 Jews living in Trond- heim; about three-quarters are members of the synagogue. Shabbat services are typical- ly held every other Friday. The chief rabbi of Norway, Michael Melchior, lives in Israel but pe- riodically travels to Oslo and Trondheim to conduct services. (Melchior’s father was the long- time chief rabbi of Denmark.) When Melchior isn’t in town, services are usually led by Israeli-born Asher Serussi, a re- ligious leader in the communi- ty who has lived in Trondheim for 30 years. Serussi describes the Trondheim Synagogue as “Orthodox but very flexible and modern.… Most of the people here are not observant Jews,” he says. “Our members are interest- ed in the Jewish culture and tra- ditions, but they don’t keep ko- sher and they don’t keep Shab- bat. They enjoy very much when we have celebrations for holi- days — then it’s a full house” For the more religious, the question about how to handle Shabbat’s start and end times has been a topic of debate ever since the congregation was founded in 1905. According to halakhah, Shabbat begins a few minutes before sunset and lasts for twenty-five hours, but Trond- heim is located so far north that the amount of daylight can vary between twenty hours in the summer to just four hours in the winter. In a country known as “the land of the midnight sun,” what’s an Orthodox congregation to do? Other communities in far north- ern latitudes handle the issue in a variety of ways. Some set the
Shabbat clock based on Jerusa- lem time, while others divide the day equally into two twelve-hour segments. Some start Shabbat at the traditional moment, even if that means lighting candles around midnight. Moen says the Trondheim congregation devel- oped its own approach in its ear- ly years: here, Shabbat begins at 5:30 p.m. on Fridays and ends at 6:30 p.m. on Saturdays, re- gardless of the time of year and whether there’s sunlight or po- lar darkness. “We have grown up with it,” says Moen. “We are the only Orthodox synagogue in the world doing it this way.” There is a small museum in the same building as the syna- gogue, designed in part to com- bat antisemitism. The Jewish Museum Trondheim opened in 1997 and attracts 7,000 visi- tors a year, many of them local schoolchildren. They come on field trips to learn about the Ho- locaust and the history of Jew- ish life in Trondheim. The base- ment of the museum has a small mikveh that hasn’t been used since before the German occu- pation. At the urging of two lo- cal Orthodox families, it is now in the process of being restored. Moen says that despite its many challenges, the Trondheim Jewish community is now on solid footing and looking for- ward to continuing to meet the spiritual and cultural needs of residents and tourists. “We have a lot of young people and we ha- ven’t seen this much activity in our community since before the war. We have a beautiful shul. If you want a place to pray, the syn- agogue is open to any Jew that wants to come.” JTA
22 AUTUMN 2025
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