Conclusion

Abstract

During my interviews with Jews in Denmark, I often asked about the future of the community. What would it look like in ten years? In fifty? Would it exist at all, and if so, in what form? The answers I received varied considerably, but a majority of them were strikingly bleak. Many Jews doubted that the Mosaiske Troessamfund could hold out for many more years, given its shrinking membership and its looming financial crises; other Jewish institutions, like Machsike Hadas and the kosher butchers, seemed destined for imminent collapse. My informants remarked on the high rates of intermarriage and the shrinking pool of religiously observant Jews. Given such trends, how could the community hope to survive? Some of the most pessimistic views came from older Jews, who sometimes found it hard to convey to me just how much the Jewish world had changed since their childhoods. Jewish life for them had once been something all-encompassing, an experience of the world in which everything moved in a rhythm from Sabbath to Sabbath, where Jewish observance and society had defined the contours of their existence. Now the Jewish community was hardly a community at all, just the remnants of a community, a collection of the people who maintained the old forms dimly and intermittently and who would soon cease to maintain them at all.