Visit to Norway

Helen Goldrein I’ve long held the opinion that if you’re going to go on holiday in the winter, it might as well be a proper winter holiday. Not for me sunsoaked beaches and balmy evenings. I want snow, roaring log fires, and maybe a cup or two of something hot and reviving. So people who know me were not too surprised when we chose to take our family holiday in Tromsø, Northern Norway, last December. Located about 350km north of the Arctic Circle, Tromsø is plunged into the darkness of the polar night from around the end of November until mid-January. The sun did not rise above the horizon for the duration of our trip. It was only once we had arrived in town that we realised the implications of this for the timing of the start of Shabbat, lighting our Chanukah candles, and so on! Fortunately, despite being in the wilderness of the frozen north, we had good internet access, and naturally we weren’t the first people to come up against this problem. It seems there are two alternative solutions that are widely accepted. The first is to use the time from the nearest town where the sun does rise and set. The second, useful only to visitors, is to continue using the time from your place of origin. This of course does mean that multiple visitors from different cities might all light their Shabbat candles at different times. However, it wasn’t a problem for us as we had all travelled together from Cambridge. The polar darkness was not quite as dark as I had anticipated. The ambient light level varies from night, through ‘astronomical twilight’ (almost indistinguishable from night), and dimly-lit ‘nautical twilight’ to ‘civil twilight’, which is roughly as bright as an overcast day.

Since there was plenty of street lighting, and almost every building was festooned with decorative lights, it never felt unbearably dark. It was also not as cold as you might imagine. Some years ago we visited Northern Sweden in winter, where temperatures plunged to -22°C during our visit. In Tromsø by comparison, the temperature hovered around freezing point in town, getting slightly lower at night or when we ventured away from the built-up area. Thick coats and hats were essential but the climate was very manageable. There was plenty to do and see, with numerous galleries and museums and some wonderful contemporary architecture all within walking distance of the centre of town. We also took a fabulous trip out into the countryside where we saw reindeer, moose and eagles in their breathtakingly beautiful natural habitats. We visited a terrific exhibition called “Homo Religiosus” in the Perspektivet photography museum, which documented the wide variety of faiths currently represented in Tromsø, with the notable absence of Jews. There is at present no (active) Jewish population in Tromsø, though this was not always the case. On a corner of a public square in the centre of the town, just across from the Cathedral, is a memorial to the seventeen Jews of Tromsø who were deported to Auschwitz in 1942. Although there was never a shul in Tromsø, the community seems to have been active and committed, travelling to Trondheim (over 1000km away!) to celebrate Bar Mitzvahs and other occasions.

The memorial lists only a few family names, and looking at the dates it is clear that in some cases multiple

generations of the same family - grandparents, parents and children - were all wiped out. The youngest person named on the memorial was only 3 years old. We discovered that the memorial was erected in the late 1990s at the request of Kåre Kleivan, a Norwegian man who had grown up in Tromsø and had left to fight with the Allies against the Nazis. He and another resistance fighter, Markus Rotvold, had helped the Jewish Smith family in their flight from Tromsø across the border into Sweden and ultimately Finland. Although the family reached safety, the father Herman Smith returned to Tromsø after learning that his wife’s sister had died, leaving two young orphans. Shortly after reaching them, Herman was arrested by the Nazis and deported. When Kåre Kleivan was asked by family and friends on his 80th birthday what he would like as a gift, he asked for the memorial to the Jews of Tromsø to be erected. Both Kleivan and Rotvold have been recognised by Yad Vashem as Righteous Among the Nations.

As the end of our trip coincided with the start of Chanukah, we decided to light our candles by the memorial, in tribute to those who had perished. Someone else had already lit a memorial candle there on the first night, and it became a very emotional experience to say the brachot (including shehecheyanu) and watch our candles burn down. It was an honour to use our Chanukah lights to illuminate this little corner of the polar darkness.