Abandoned Viking Village in Iceland
(2018) Iceland gets its first Jewish Rabbi and the damage that followed has been horrendous as the innocent Icelanders become the most vaccinated in Europe and second to Israel.
(JTA) REYKJAVIK, Iceland (JTA) — At a windswept harbor of this Nordic capital, a bearded man wearing a black hat dips eating utensils into the icy water while hissing from pain induced by the bitter cold.
Perplexed by the spectacle, a caretaker helpfully offers to let the man and his three companions use a washing basin to clean their dishes instead of precariously bending over the freezing water.
“Thank you, but we need to do it in the sea,” one of the men, 27-year-old Avi Feldman of New York, tells the caretaker. “It’s for religious reasons.”
Feldman and his companions, a journalist and two relatives who are visiting him here for the holidays, haul the wet dishes back to a car parked at the foot of one of the many snow-capped volcanoes surrounding this gray but picturesque capital city.
The exchange last week was Feldman’s first attempt since registering as a resident of Iceland at explaining to a local a potentially awkward Jewish religious custom: in this case, “tevilat kelim” — immersing utensils acquired from non-Jews to make them kosher.
But it won’t be the last explanation coming from the New York native, who this year became Iceland’s first resident rabbi in documented history. Feldman and his wife, Mushky, and their two small daughters settled in the country as its parliament prepares to vote on a bill that would outlaw nonmedical circumcision of boys.
Measuring his words on the subject, Feldman, a Chabad rabbi, told JTA before his arrival only that he and his wife “hope to bring awareness to local Icelandic people and especially to lawmakers in their decision on rules.” He also said the bill is a “matter of great concern” for those who “value religious freedom.”
According to Feldman, the issue is not rooted in any hostility to Judaism in Iceland.
Hotly opposed by the several hundred Jews and Muslims who live in this Christian nation of 330,000 citizens, the bill has wide support in the parliament and population, according to polls, and is expected to pass when brought to a vote at a date that has yet to be determined.
This is part of the reason that leaders of European Jewry view the bill as a dangerous precedent amid a two-pronged attack on fundamental customs of Judaism and Islam – including circumcision and ritual slaughter of animals, which already is illegal in Iceland. As European nationalists hostile to Islam or Judaism target such customs, so do secularists and progressives who find the rituals intolerably cruel.
In the rest of Europe, the debate about such bans is informed by the continent’s sad history of centuries of virulent anti-Semitism.
As soon as the Jews move in, destruction follows…
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https://forward.com/news/breaking-news/398204/iceland-welcomes-first-rabbi-as-it-considers-ban-on-circumcision/
