Iceland’s Jewish community welcomes its first permanent Torah

In festive ceremony, members dance the new, donated scroll, which took a year to write, into Reykjavik Chabad center

By Marcy Oster 17 February 2020, 11:57 pm Edit

Members of the Jewish community of Reykjavik bringing its new Torah scroll to the local Chabad center there on February 16, 2020. (Gabriel Rutenberg/Chabad.org via JTA)

JTA — Iceland has welcomed its first permanent Torah scroll.

The final letters of the Torah were written at a reception last Thursday at the home of the US Ambassador to Iceland, Jeffrey Ross Gunter, who is Jewish, according to Chabad.com.

The new scroll, which took a year to write, was donated to the Jewish community of Reykjavik by Uri Krauss, of Zurich, Switzerland.

On Sunday, members of the city’s Jewish community brought the Torah scroll to the local Chabad Jewish Center.

The Chabad center was opened in 2018, the first full-time Jewish institution on the island nation. The center has been borrowing the Torah scroll that it used every Shabbat morning until now.