Beyond the Pale: How Post World War II Immigrants Affected Jewish Cultural Life in Sweden

• In Event: Jewish Lives and Communities After War and Genocide

Abstract

Despite its small numbers, Jewish life has been a growing part of Swedish culture since 1774, when Aaron Isaac arrived in Sweden from Germany and became the first documented Jewish person in the country who chose not to convert to Christianity. Jews received full citizenship and religious freedom in the 19th century. While Jews immigrated to Sweden in the early part of the twentieth century, it was World War II that brought a new wave of Jewish immigrants to Sweden's shores, when the country eventually stepped in to open its doors to victims of the Holocaust. While some of these victims moved on, others stayed in Sweden becoming a part of the Jewish cultural life there, affecting both the Jewish community and the country of Sweden at large. The Jewish community of Sweden today bears little resemblance to those early days of German Jewish immigrants from the eighteenth century, and yet little has been studied about how Jewish life in Sweden transformed from a mostly German descent and cultural population to one now made up predominately of the descendants of Holocaust survivors.

In this paper, I want to examine this little-known part of Jewish and Swedish history with an in-depth examination of how these two cultures have influenced each other, and how Jewish culture in Sweden changed due to the Central and Eastern European immigrants and Holocaust survivors who made Sweden their home in a post-Holocaust world. Through this paper I examine and compare cultural figures who impacted Sweden’s history prior to the war with the significant shift that happened post-war. While it seems an obvious and easy question to answer (in that yes, Jewish cultural life did change in Sweden post-war), the specific cultural elements and ethos of the changes in the Jewish community, and in Sweden’s response to that community, require closer examination. By studying the Jewish community in Sweden, we can not only bring awareness to this oft forgotten part of Jewish history, but also bring to light a new way to look at the cultural dynamics of Jewish-Scandinavian relationships.

Author

• Karen Uslin, Defiant Requiem Foundation