Iceland only has one rabbi. In a world filled with hate, he leads with kindness.

13.09.2023 - 12:27 / insider.com

Rabbi Avraham Feldman stands in front of an erupting volcano, reciting a blessing.

Located an hour outside of Iceland's capital city, Reykjavík, Fagradalsfjall spews orange lava like a pot of boiling water left too long on the stove. Rivers of molten magma ooze through crevices in the black igneous rock, blanketing the surrounding valley as clouds of steam and ash dissipate into the air. 

As the volcano gurgles behind him, Feldman casually holds up his phone to film a short video. With his eyes squinting into the sun from behind wire-framed glasses, he slowly and patiently explains the meaning of the blessing's Hebrew words.

"This makes us stop and think about this unbelievable creation, this beautiful world that we live in, and we think about the artist who created all of it," he says. "So we make a blessing together, and this blessing is about God's power and God's strength, and we see this and we feel this even more when we see a sight like this."

Reciting blessings over volcanoes is one of many unconventional rhythms of Jewish life in the land of fire and ice.

Feldman is Iceland's sole rabbi, the leader of Europe's smallest Jewish community. There are about 300 Jews in a country of about 354,000 people — or .08% of Iceland's population. Despite the country's complicated Jewish history, homogeneous religious makeup, and rising incidents of global antisemitism, Iceland's small Jewish presence continues to thrive.

Feldman, 32, his wife, Mushky, 31, and their children are members of the Chabad sect of Hasidic Judaism, a movement focused on Jewish outreach popularized by the late Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson (known as "the Rebbe"). They are one of 4,900 Chabad emissary families who run Jewish institutions worldwide, Chabad's official website says. Mushky grew up in Gothenburg, Sweden, where her parents founded the first Nordic Chabad house in the 1990s, while Feldman hails from Brooklyn, New York.

A year after the Feldmans married in Sweden in 2014, they moved to Berlin to lead a Jewish student center. But they kept hearing about Iceland. Intrigued by the small Jewish community that had never had a rabbi or a synagogue, they visited for the first time in 2017, the year tourism in the country peaked. After several trips, they decided to make it their home a year later and establish a center for Jewish life in Reykjavík.

"It used to be unheard of for an observant Jew to leave the Jewish community and go to a place where there is no Jewish infrastructure, but the Rebbe empowered people to create whatever Jewish infrastructure is needed," Feldman told Insider. "So instead of looking at the negative — how you're missing this, and it's missing that — the Rebbe taught us how to look at the opportunity,