Years of transition

The starting point

The community's membership base had, ever since its founding, remained fairly uniform, right up until the large generations came of age. Most of the members were descended from Cantonists – Jewish soldiers forcibly conscripted into the army of the Russian Tsar – as well as from soldiers of the Russian army who arrived later and remained in Finland after their period of service. The community was small, socially close-knit, and in many ways self-sufficient.

Developments from the 1960s onwards

Education and social opening

The 1960s brought about great changes. An ever-larger share of the community's young people continued their studies at upper secondary school, and, through this, made new friends and encountered a new way of life. As many of those who had passed their matriculation examination went on to universities and other institutions of higher education, the circle of friends of Jewish young people not only widened, but also became more varied.

Mixed marriages and the question of halakha

Mixed marriages had already taken place before the wars, but due to academisation, they became increasingly common, and ever fewer found another Finnish Jew as a spouse. According to halakha, i.e. Jewish law, Jewishness is inherited from the mother, so the child of a Jewish mother was automatically Jewish. The child of a Jewish father and a non-Jewish mother, by contrast, required a formal conversion, that is a giur, if they wished to join the community. This applied in particular to Jewish men.

The expansion of Helsinki

At the same time Helsinki was expanding, and more and more young families moved to the suburbs or to the surrounding municipalities in pursuit of either cheaper flats in apartment blocks or living in detached and terraced houses. It was no longer possible to walk to the synagogue on the Jewish holidays, and the children began to look for hobbies in their new neighbourhoods instead of continuing their activities in the sports club Makkabi or in the Jewish scout troop Kefir.

Politics and secularisation

Although no systematic research has been carried out on the subject, much of the community's oral tradition suggests that the political thinking of young people became polarised during these years and that some of the young moved from the centre-right to supporting, for instance, the Social Democrats.

Some of the young people embraced Zionism and moved to Israel, while others became secularised – often for precisely the same reasons described above. For the latter, the community no longer played the same central role as it had for their parents.

The rise of left-wing criticism of Israel

As the anti-Israel sentiment of the far left and of the communists spread into Finnish awareness as well, many severed their ties to the community. On the other hand, kibbutzes became increasingly common holiday and gap-year destinations for ordinary Finns. There, one might find a Jewish partner in Israel and get married. Such families might then move to Finland. Thus, Israeli Jews began to move into the community.

Immigration from Eastern Europe

With the collapse of the Soviet Union, Jews also began to move to Finland from the east, and the diversification of the community accelerated.

The present day — the significance of new members

The arrival of new members can, at least to some extent, be seen as the saviour of the life of the Helsinki Jewish Community. While an ever-larger group of Jews of Cantonist background left the community – the reasons being secularisation, assimilation, an unwillingness to pay the community fee, or the general Finnish habit of leaving religious communities – the joining of new members kept the community's membership roughly the same and at the same time raised the number of children at Gan and at the Helsinki Jewish School.

Today, the Helsinki Jewish Community is considerably more diverse than it was a hundred years ago: the backgrounds of its members range from Cantonists to the Israeli and Eastern European newcomers of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. This diversity has brought with it new tensions, but also new vitality.

Diversity as a resource for the community

The years of transition of the Helsinki Jewish Community are not over – they have merely changed their form. The community that once grew from the soldiers of the Tsar's army into a unified Finnish-Jewish community, is today a multilingual, multicultural community that is opening in many directions. The question of what it means to be a Finnish Jew has been asked anew in every generation.