A Tale of Two Museums
A Tale of Two Museums
First a joke:
In some obscure village in Soviet Russia, it was rumored that a shipment of oranges would be delivered that day. People queued up at four in the morning waiting patiently for their dozen oranges. At eight in the morning, the commissar shouted in his bullhorn, “Jews, get out of line. There are no oranges for you.”
The Jews shuffled away, dejected.
At ten o’clock, the commissar pulled out his bullhorn, “Only members of the Party will receive oranges today!” The line shortened considerably.
At noon, the commissar announced to the few remaining, “There will be no oranges today! Go home.”
One Russian turned to the other and said, “See, I told you. The Jews get preferential treatment.”
Funny, eh?
After traveling all night and day, I arrived bleary eyed to the comforting voice of my old friend, Pastor Erik Selle in Oslo. He is a committed Christian and a right-wing conservative activist. I am a serious Jew, left of center. We have shared a lot over nearly twenty years. We first met in a cavernous hall at an AIPAC meeting in Washington, DC. We share a love for Israel and a spirit of adventure.
On the ride to his home, Erik told me that Norway feels likehe would imagine Germany felt in the 1930s. He regaled me with accounts of incidents of intimidation by the 200,000 Muslim immigrants, mostly centered in East Oslo, which has become a virtual no-go zone for most Norwegians, including the police who look the other way and ignore their assaults on Norwegian culture and Norwegian people. And particularly vulnerable is the small Jewish community which has had to cower in the wake of October 7. “Norway is by far the most antisemitic country in Europe!” he declared.
I listened without the knowledge to refute his histrionicremarks. I thought to myself that even though these events were probably true, without context I am sure his picture is distorted from reality, overblown.
After two days in Oslo, I concluded that if I were a youngJew in Oslo, I would give myself six months to get out and go anywhere else where I could feel safer. Anywhere else. And I say this with a lot of sadness. Oslo is a beautiful city with Scandinavian charm. But Erik is right. The rule of law and civil society has begun to rot.
Here is history’s rule of thumb. The Jews are first to get thrown out of line. As the day wears on, they will never get their oranges. But after the Jews are pushed out of the queue, everyone else will suffer too.
Erik arranged for us to have three meetings. The first was with Dr. Vivebek Moe from the H.L. Senteret. She holds a doctorate in social science research and is a serious academic. Dr. Moe, not Jewish, is commissioned by the Norwegian government to research antisemitism and islamophobia in Norway. We met in the same castle like building that houses the Holocaust Museum (it seems to me that most every European city has a Holocaust museum). During the war, this enormous building was Vadim Quisling’s headquarters. Quisling sold Norway out to the Nazis and brutally administered Nazi policy throughout the occupation. At the conclusion of the war, Quisling was shot by his own people on the executioner’s block.
Dr. Moe spoke about the alarming rise in antisemitism, particularly by the Muslim mobs. Just a few days before my arrival, Oslo women organized a women’s march. A modest Jewish contingent showed up in solidarity with their sisters. They were surrounded by women wearing hijabs, shouted at, jeered, and spat upon. The police eventually showed up not to arrest the intimidators as one might expect, but to escort the Jews out before anyone got hurt. Dr. Moe explained that she is not sure how much of this hatred is antisemitic per se, or simply anti-Zionist. Probably a mixture of both. Zionism is the twenty-first century codeword for all forms of racism. In Norway, to say that one supports the existence of the Jewish state is as though they are declaring themselves to be avowed racists. Imagine that, separated by two generations the Jews today who build a homeland for themselves and defend it from monstrous brutality and Governor George Wallace share the same racist tropes. Reality has become twisted.
“Is this anti-Zionism the same as Jew hatred?” I asked.
“Hard to know,” she replied. “For some it is certainly antisemitism. For others it is opposition to Israel. But,” she warned, “It is only with one click of the mouse that anti-Zionism becomes antisemitism.”
“Do you foresee this getting worse?”
“Of course, I cannot tell. The data need to be studied. But I am not encouraged.”
“If you were a young Jew living in Norway, what would you do?”
“I would probably leave if I could find someplace to go.”
Our next visit was to an old synagogue that is now the Jewish Museum. Most European cities have Jewish museums telling the story of the local communities and showing some Jewish ritual objects to teach students and visitors about Jews and Judaism. European Jewish communities today are a small fraction of what they once were. But give the Europeans credit. I doubt anyone would find a Jewish museum to remember the Jewish communities of Baghdad, Cairo, or Yemen recently expelled from their historic homelands.
A serious, no-nonsense man named Metz administers the museum, which is funded by the government. He is not Jewish. And he is tough. The museum needs someone like him. He shared some of the same stories and sentiments as Dr. Moe.
“Are you worried about security in the museum.”
“We are not worried, but we are prepared. Tucked behind the display cases, we have a way to counter violence if someone were to come after us with a knife. This is very effective. We train our docents (usually young men from the Jewish community) how to disarm any attacker.”
He pulled out a wooden club from behind an exhibit.
“Do you have weapons on site?”
“Officially, we do not have guns,” he said cryptically.
“What do you foresee is the future of the Jewish community in Oslo in twenty years?”
“I do not think there will be a Jewish community in Oslo in twenty years,” he replied. “This is tragic. Jews have lived here for a thousand years.”
The next day, Erik planned a tourist day for both of us. We visited the new Edvard Munch museum—a recently opened modernist structure overlooking Oslo’s most beautiful cityscape and harbor. Munch is Norway’s most famous artist. In a strange way, his art reflects his Norwegian-ness. Like the countryside and the climate, his paintings are not quite refined. His best paintings evoke death or erotic longing, human fear and striving. They are not pretty like the French paintings of his era, or bright and bold like his Dutch contemporaries.
Annestein joined us for a late lunch. She is orginally Norwegian and is also an Israeli citizen. She is the mother of five children. One of her daughters serves as a platoon leader in the IDF. The daughter was featured on a promotional video produced before October 7, together with many other lone soldiers from countries around the world. The video was discovered in Norway and went viral throughout Norway, promoted by a Muslim activist. Her phone and social media blew up with lurid death threats, the vilest epithets imaginable accusing her, among other things, of committing child murder and genocide. She had to move for her own security. Her story appeared in the press, adding to her exposure.
Annesteen turned to the police for help. They promised an investigation but have done nothing. They do not want to deal with this problem. Then the case was closed with no resolution, despite the reams of evidence she presented to the police. But the antisemitism existed before the October 7th massacre. Her older son, an elite soccer high school athlete, played for an Oslo team consisting of a majority of Muslim teammates. After a recent game, a gang of his own teammates beat him up.
“Did you go to the police?”
“No, they would do nothing. He transferred to play for a different team.”
“Will he stay in Norway?”
“He wants to. This is his home. But he may not. My younger son is nine years old. His teacher conducted a lesson on circumcision, equating the Jewish custom of brit milah with female genital mutilation. After the class, the boys in his class surrounded him, pulled down his pants and humiliated him.”
“Did you complain to the principal?”
“Of course, but nothing was done so I had to move him to a new school!”
“Why do you stay here?” I asked.
“This is my home and I want to fight for it as long as I can. But the situation is becoming much worse and I am constantly threatened. I will stay and fight for now. Two of my daughters live in Israel and one is married to an Israeli. I have a place to go if I must leave. But I am going to fight this as long as I can.”
Here is a picture of Munch’s most famous painting, the Scream, painted in 1893.
Munch painted this more than a century ago. Notice the desperation on the face of the screamer. The scream is both loud and silent at the same time. Covering the ears with the wide-open mouth, the screamer’s despair is palpable. But focus also on the back right at the two silent figures, looking away from the screamers. They don’t seem to notice or care about the lonely desperation of their fellow human being. The scream haunts the viewer with an unforgettable discomfort.
Munch was painting the Jews of Norway in our day. Their screams are loud. At the same time, their scream are silent, or perhaps not heard. Too many onlookers stand on the bridge and choose to look away.