by Nina Zolotow (Berkeley, CA)
I’m sorry,” the Danish receptionist said in English. “But I’ll need to search your bag before you go in.”
When we had planned our second trip to Copenhagen, I hadn’t thought of going to the Dansk Jødisk Museum, the Danish Jewish Museum—I didn’t even know that it existed. But it turned out that the fifth-floor apartment I’d rented for our week-long stay in the Norrebro neighborhood overlooked a beautiful, old Jewish cemetery from the 17th century. The first time I stood on the apartment’s balcony, I noticed that in the shade of several very tall, slender trees, there was a cemetery, not the park I had expected. It looked wild and untended, with countless worn, old gravestones of varying sizes, some standing straight up, some crooked, and others lying completely flat, all surrounded by lush, flowering summer weeds. And at the opposite end of the cemetery from our apartment, there was an old brick wall that had a small gate in it. The sense of death, of life, and of history all together left me with a quiet feeling of awe.
However, I hadn’t even realized that Jews had lived in Denmark since the 17th century, and now it turned out there had been enough Jews in Denmark to fill up a cemetery. But, of course, Jews went everywhere, didn’t they? Wandering Jews, they called us in the 19th century because we were always looking for ways to escape oppression, persecution, and violence—always searching for places we could call home. That was what became the “Jewish Question.”
But even after exploring the cemetery itself, which was founded in 1694 and was 13,500 square meters with around 5,500 burials, and then reading up on the history of Jews in Denmark, I was left with many questions.
My husband, Brad, was also intrigued. So, when I told him I discovered in my online searches that there was a Jewish museum in central Copenhagen, he immediately said, “Let’s go!”
It took us a while to find the museum because it was, to our surprise, part of the complex of old buildings surrounding the Royal Palace and the entrance was through a very small contemporary addition to a larger old building. When we walked through the front door into the museum’s lobby, there was just one person sitting at the reception desk and we were the only visitors in the room. The receptionist spoke perfect English, but she was very Danish-looking—blond, blue-eyed, and with Scandinavian features—so she was clearly not someone who shared my heritage.
After we bought out tickets, the receptionist asked us whether we wanted to use one of the lockers before we went into the museum. When we said no, she searched my very small handbag.
The receptionist apologized again after I showed her the sunglasses, sunscreen, lipstick, tissues, and charge cards that I had tucked into my little cross-body bag.
“I understand,” I said. “I’m Jewish so I appreciate you being careful.” Still a wave of unease washed over me at the thought that even here in Copenhagen—where everyone seemed so civilized, so very nice—extra security was needed at any place that was “Jewish.”
When we walked through the doorway into the museum proper, we entered a very unusual space. Although the outer shell of the building, which was originally the Royal Boat House from the 17th century, had brick walls, large arched windows, and vaulted ceilings, the interior was very modern and untraditional. The inner, white paneled walls were tilted and asymmetrical, and they seem to be arranged in some kind of labyrinth. And the wooden floors that guided visitors to the exhibits embedded in the walls were sloping instead of flat. Altogether, the design left me feeling tipsy and off balance.
Then, we noticed a very odd little display that had video images of Jewish people projected into a small model of a two-story house and a companion audio track promising a brief history of 400 years of Jewish life in Denmark, starting with the arrival of the very first Jewish merchants back in 1622. So we sat down together and put on the headphones. And as soon as I heard the narrator begin with these questions — Where are you going? Are you going home? Where is home? — I started to cry.
At first, I felt embarrassed about the tears flowing down my cheeks, but then I thought fuck it, it’s a Jewish museum and I’m Jewish, and if I fucking feel like crying I’ll fucking cry even if I have no idea why. My sorrow felt so primal, triggered instantly from somewhere deep inside me.
As I continued listening to the audio presentation and watching the display, I calmed down. Most of what the presentation covered was information I was already familiar with by then—how the first Jews in Denmark were Sephardic merchants invited by Denmark’s King Christian IV to settle in a new town, Glückstadt, on the river Elbe, in the early 17th century. The story is that King Christian thought that having Jewish merchants living in his new town would bring more business to the community. Later Ashkenazi Jews, like the Jews I’m descended from, also joined the Sephardic merchants.
I even laughed to myself when I saw the video images of actors playing early Jewish merchants in their storehouse with bags of coffee beans and chocolate. Ah hah! I thought. They tolerated the Jewish traders because they wanted all that good stuff those Jews knew how to obtain. But then they showed a short scene illustrating how the Jews back then had to practice their religion in secret, hidden behind drawn curtains and closed doors in their own houses. It turned out that the dispensation made for the Jews by King Christian only included protection, the right to hold “private religious services,” and the right to maintain their own cemetery. I quickly realized that being “tolerated” and “protected” was not the same as being an equal member of Danish society. Same old, same old, I thought.
Eventually, though, in the late 18th century, the King expanded the rights of Danish Jews, allowing them to buy real estate, establish schools, study at the university, and join guilds. Then, finally, a royal decree on March 29, 1814 granted the Jewish people the same rights as other citizens. In contrast, the Russian Empire, where all four of my grandparents were born and where they were restricted to living within the Pale of Settlement, never granted citizenship to the Jews who lived within its borders.
However, for various reasons—the Danish government restricting immigration to people who had money, Danish Jews intermarrying with Danish Christians—the population of Jews in Denmark during the 400 years after they first arrived remained fairly small. And now the population was only about 6,000.
After the presentation was over, we walked through the rest of the museum, which was dedicated to the more recent history of the Jews in Denmark, especially during World War II. We learned that the walls inside the museum were carefully arranged in form of the four Hebrew letters that spelled mitzvah, which is the Hebrew word for “commandment” and also for “good deeds” that fulfill a religious commandment.
The mitzvah that the museum was designed to reflect was the aid the Danish people gave to their Jewish neighbors, over 7,000 in total, during the Nazi invasion, when they helped almost of all them to escape on boats to Sweden, which was neutral during the World War II. Later, after the war was over, almost all the Jewish refugees returned to Denmark, though some then emigrated to Israel, the United Kingdom, and the United States. That’s why Denmark had the highest survival rate of Jewish people of any country invaded by the Germans: 95 percent. And two of the people who were saved from the Nazis became well-known public figures. Danish physicist Niels Bohr, whose mother was Jewish, was one of the early refugees who fled to Sweden, and, after he himself evacuated, he helped arrange the mass rescue of over 7,000 Danish Jews. And Arne Jacobsen, an architect and mid-century modern Danish designer, escaped on a small boat to Sweden and spent his two years there creating fabric designs based on Swedish nature. After he returned to Copenhagen, he became world renowned for both his famous buildings, such as The Stelling House and Aarhaus City Hall, and for his designs of everyday objects, including his iconic Egg chair. He is now considered the grandfather of modern Danish design.
This, I knew, was in stark contrast to the fate of the Jews in Lithuania, the country my mother’s family was from, where the Lithuanian people aided the Nazis in exterminating their Jewish neighbors, resulting in the lowest survival rate for Jewish people out of all the countries invaded by the Germans, only 5 percent. The Nazis didn’t even need to move the Jews of Lithuania to concentration camps because the work of taking people into the woods, shooting them, and burying them in mass graves was often done by the Lithuanians themselves. And I knew too that some of my maternal grandmother’s family members who had not emigrated from Lithuania before the war, including her two brothers, Leizer and Laibl, were murdered in this exact way.
“Even though it’s still a bit weird to me to think of Jews living in Scandinavia,” I said to my husband, “They were right to come here.”
As we walked out of the museum into the sunny courtyard, I noticed that what had originally looked like an abstract sculpture outside the museum’s entrance was actually the outline of a ship. And I realized then that with its slanted, uneven floors and its angled walls, the museum had intentionally evoked in me the visceral sensations of walking on a small boat out at sea and the disorientation of a world turned upside down. Those feelings were still clinging to me.
As I found my feet again on the steady earth of the low-lying, flat city and we headed back to the apartment overlooking the old Jewish cemetery, I remembered that—come to think of it—today wasn’t the only time I had cried in a Jewish museum. The first time was in 2019 at the end of our visit to the Jewish museum in Sevilla, Spain, which we decided to visit only because it was just a couple of blocks from where we were staying, which, by chance, happened to be in the old Jewish quarter, now called Santa Cruz, adjacent to the Alcazar. The story was that the Jewish quarter was right next to the royal palace so everyone would know that Jews there were under the protection of the king.
Even though Sevilla once had the largest Jewish community in Spain (around 5,000 people, including doctors, scientists, lawyers, merchants, and money lenders) with 33 synagogues, the Centro de Interpretaction Juderia de Sevilla was small and modest—just a few window-less rooms in a very old Sephardic house. Displayed on colored walls, the exhibit was mainly a collection of manuscripts, maps, and other documents, some from the 1391 pogrom and some from the time of Spanish Inquisition, along with legends about a few of the people who had lived in the Jewish quarter before the Jews were expelled from Seville in 1483 and a small number of everyday objects they had left behind. These all just left me feeling vaguely sad. All those written explanations and stories printed on placards, and old “things” behind glass felt like tales from a distant past that had nothing to do with me. In the last room before the exit, the delicate, yellowed dress of a child who had once lived in the Jewish quarter evoked a small wave of sorrow within me but didn’t move me to tears.
However, when we followed the signs to the exit, which led us in a different direction than the entrance, we walked through a room where there were dozens of large black iron keys hanging from the ceilings on strings. Without knowing what those keys signified, I felt an upswelling of a very powerful but unnamable emotion.
“Wow,” I said to Brad, as I stopped walking and just looked up at all those keys.
“Yes,” he said. “It’s intense.”
Then, after we passed out of that final room and returned to the reception area, I asked the receptionist in English, “What is the meaning of those keys?” She explained that when the Jews were expelled from Spain in 1492, the Jews of Sevilla took their house keys with them because they hoped they’d be able to come back to their homes one day. Living in exile, they had passed those keys down to their descendants, generation after generation after generation, until now, when those very same keys were donated to the museum. And that’s when I started to cry.
When I returned to the US after visiting Copenhagen, I walked to Indian Rock in the Berkeley Hills and climbed up the steep steps that were carved into the rock to reach the top. I wanted to see the panorama that never fails to thrill me—the great San Francisco Bay shining in the sun, with Mount Tamalpais to the northwest, San Francisco to the southwest, and in between the Golden Gate, the entrance to the bay that opens out into the Pacific Ocean. “Is this my home?” I wondered. Of course, I was born in California and lived here most of my adult life, but sometimes I felt like a stranger here on the Pacific Rim, half a world away from Eastern Europe where all four of my grandparents were born.
All those keys in the museum in Seville were so heartbreaking because of the hopes they represented—for hundreds of years, people held onto those keys on the chance that one day, someday, they might be able to use them once again to open the doors their ancestors had closed behind them when they were expelled from Spain. But I never had that kind of hope. The only relatives of my Lithuanian grandmother who survived the Holocaust were two of her sister’s children, Israel and Leah. After the war, the siblings met up in Lithuania and went back to their old house in Kudirkos Naumiestis. There they found their home was already occupied by Lithuanians who refused to leave. So Israel left for Brazil and Leah made it to Israel. Why would I ever think about going “home” to a place like that?
On the other hand, there I was at that moment on top of a large, volcanic rock on land where for six thousand years the xučyun (Chochenyo speaking Ohlone people) had lived, but which after that was claimed by Spain in 1542, and after that was owned by Mexico when it became independent in 1821, and after that was purchased from Mexico by the US after the Mexican-American war in 1848. I just looked out at the view and took it all in.
Nina Zolotow just loves to write, and she has been doing it for her entire adult life. Currently she is writing creative non-fiction and experimental fiction/poetry, which you can find on her blog Delusiastic!, where there is both brand new and older works, and you can also subscribe to her on Substack, where she is releasing one story a week. Nina has also written or co-written four books on yoga (see yogafortimesofchange.com) as well as being the Editor in Chief and writer for the Yoga for Healthy Aging blog for 12 years. Before that there was 20 years of writing instructional manuals for the software industry, including many books for programmers. And somewhere in there was an MFA from San Francisco State in Creative Writing. All of that taught her how to write simply and clearly when needed but also to go crazy with words when that seems right.
The Jewish Writing Project 