Iceland’s Jewish community has opened the country’s first permanent Jewish center, establishing a lasting home for Jewish life in the North Atlantic nation for the first time in its history.

The Beit Shvidler Jewish Center of Iceland was inaugurated on July 7 in downtown Reykjavík, the capital. Housed in a renovated three-story building of roughly 9,000 square feet that previously operated as a bar, the center will serve the country’s small Jewish community — estimated at between 100 and 300 people — as well as the thousands of Jewish visitors who travel to Iceland each year. It is named for philanthropist Eugene Shvidler, among the donors who funded the project.

The center brings religious, educational, and cultural life together under one roof, with a Judaica and kosher shop, a community events hall, year-round programming, and a permanent exhibition, the “Gallery of Jewish Life in Iceland,” which traces more than a century of the island’s Jewish history through documents and photographs.

The milestone comes as Jewish life in parts of Europe is holding steady or growing even amid a surge in antisemitism since Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, attack on southern Israel, driven in significant part by Israeli migration to the continent.

According to the London-based Institute for Jewish Policy Research (JPR), Europe is home to nearly 30 percent of all Israelis living outside their country — roughly 190,000 to 200,000 people — a population that has grown steadily over the past decade.

Chabad emissaries Rabbi Avraham Feldman and his wife, Mushky, have led the community since arriving in 2018, and until now had run services, holiday celebrations, and educational programs out of their home and temporary venues across Reykjavík. Although Jews have lived in Iceland for more than a century, the country had never had a permanent synagogue or resident rabbi, an absence that had set Reykjavík apart from every other European capital.

“We dreamed of this moment for years, and today we are sitting inside the dream that became reality,” Feldman said at the inauguration, which drew more than 100 guests, including diplomats, public figures, and rabbis from neighboring Nordic countries. “This is a home where every Jew can come in, feel at home and simply be Jewish.” Among those who addressed the gathering were Acting US Ambassador Joanie Simon and Jón Gnarr, a former mayor of Reykjavík who now sits in parliament.

Icelandic Prime Minister Kristrún Frostadóttir, who has attended Jewish community events in the past, marked the occasion in a letter describing the center as “an important milestone for the Jewish community and for Icelandic society.” The opening builds on a period of gradual growth for the community, which in 2021 saw Iceland formally recognize Judaism as an official religion.