Europe’s Smallest Jewish Community Gets a Home of Its Own, Complete with Geothermal Mikvah

Reykjavik, Iceland – The small Jewish community in Iceland, long without a dedicated space for organized life, has celebrated a significant milestone with the opening of the Beit Shvidler Jewish Center of Iceland. This new center, located in downtown Reykjavik, is the country's first-ever Jewish community building, offering a much-needed hub for its members.

The roughly 9,000-square-foot facility, formerly a bar and political party headquarters, has been renovated to include a synagogue, a seminar room, a kosher shop, a community kitchen, a youth center, a library lounge, and a security center. A unique feature is its geothermally heated mikvah, utilizing Iceland's abundant volcanic heat for ritual purification.

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Jews here were yearning for a synagogue, for a rabbi, for some sort of a community, and it has been amazing to fill that need.

Rabbi Avraham Feldman, who arrived with his wife Mushky in 2018, expressed the community's long-held yearning for such a space. "Jews here were yearning for a synagogue, for a rabbi, for some sort of a community," he said, highlighting the impact of filling this need.

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Iceland has a highly diverse, dispersed and diffused Jewish community; given that we’re an isolated island, we all kind of washed up here.

Michael Klein, an American Jew living in Iceland since 2020, described the community as diverse and dispersed, "all kind of washed up here" on the isolated island. He credited the Feldmans with successfully bringing together the resources and work to transform the disused building into a vital center for both local Jews and the many visitors drawn to Iceland's natural beauty.

Jewish life in Iceland has a sparse history, with traders known to have passed through since the 1600s. The organized presence dates to the late 1800s, but for decades, Jewish life relied on informal gatherings coordinated by volunteers in rented spaces or church basements. The closure of the US Navy base in Keflavík in 2006 further reduced informal support, leaving a gap that the new center now fills.

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The Feldmans managed to pull together the resources, the building and the work to turn a disused political party headquarters and restaurant into a Jewish center that can serve not only our small community but the far larger group of visitors from all over the Jewish world who come for our natural beauty and peaceful isolation.