Chabad’s Answer to Sweden’s Jewish Problem

Leah Namdar, Chabad representative to Sweden with her husband, Rabbi Alexander Namdar, raised a family of 11 children in Gothenburg. The couple has nurtured a Jewish community, fostered Jewish identity, education and commitment despite Sweden’s hostility towards Israel and religious life.

Leah, the daughter of Dr. Naftali Loewenthal interviewed here, grew up in London. She has been an outspoken voice for Yiddishkeit, promoting faith in G-d and Jewish pride in Sweden.

Baila Olidort: Sweden is not the most hospitable of countries for a Chabad couple to raise a family. Your lifestyle and your values have been directly challenged, even threatened, at so many turns over the years—most recently your right to give your children the Jewish schooling you choose. Yet you persist, and never waver in your determination to inspire change in Sweden. Where does that come from?

Leah Namdar: I was privileged to meet the Rebbe in a yechidus [private audience] in his room as a four year old, for the first time, with my mother and sister. Back in 1974, the Rebbe was still seeing people privately, and the great advantage for my family, living in London, was that each time we came, since we were coming from overseas, we were able to have a private audience with the Rebbe.

Something that the Rebbe said during that first meeting, has given me perspective in my shlichus, [mission] and in my life in general. The Rebbe asked my sister and me: how many times a day we say the Shema? We answered that we say it twice, in the morning and in the evening. The Rebbe said: fine, very fine.

Then the Rebbe told us that he wanted to start a campaign for girls to light Shabbos candles, not just married women, and he asked us if we’d be willing to begin this campaign with lighting our own candles every Friday. At the time, no one had heard about this idea yet, and only a few months later the Rebbe publicly announced the candle lighting campaign that included girls from the age of three.

In a sense I think that the message I received from that meeting was that nobody is too small—even a four year old child—to bring more light into the world. That was a very powerful message for me.

Your husband also took a message from his own meeting with the Rebbe as a young boy.

Yes, my husband, as young child of 11, traveled from Italy and had his first yechidus with the Rebbe. During that meeting the Rebbe asked his father if my husband has a coat. He had seen my husband outside without a coat—it was December 1976, winter in New York. His father, somewhat baffled, said, yes, his son had a coat. The Rebbe told him: make sure he wears it because it is cold outside.

Think about that. The Rebbe with all the weight of the world on his shoulders, noticed one little boy, and wanted to make sure that he was warm and protected from the cold.

So we each, independently of the other, had received a message, respectively, of light and warmth. So somehow, when Sweden, a northern country that has months of cold and darkness, came up as a potential post for shlichus, the messages of our first meetings of with the Rebbe suddenly seemed very relevant.

You didn’t find Sweden particularly receptive to your light and warmth, when you arrived here.

We arrived here and found Sweden very beautiful, very serene and quiet. We saw miles and miles of untouched nature, and people here were polite. But we realized very quickly that there was something almost antiseptic about the atmosphere, that we were now living in a country where G-d’s name is not yet known.

It is considered strange to be religious or to believe in G-d in Sweden. I remember each time I came back to the U.S. and saw signs that said, “G-d bless America,” or even the expression, “thank G-d”—I felt such a relief! It’s simply not part of the vocabulary in Sweden. But over the years, people have warmed to the expression.

I remember we talked two years ago when you wanted to consider a response to an ad campaign promoting denial of G-d. You found a pretty cost-effective way to deal with it.

Yes, some humanist organization plastered signs all over the city that said, “G-d Does Not Exist” with a picture of a Jewish star, a crescent and a cross. These were bus shelter ads and they were everywhere. They even hung it on our Chabad House at the bottom of the driveway. We kept ripping it off, but they kept putting them back up. Finally my son took a can of paint and simply removed the word NOT from the ad.

The sign remained: G-d exists.

But you got your chance to go really public with a lifestyle based on faith in G-d in the documentary From Sweden Up To Heaven, that featured you and your family on national TV last year. What kind of response did you get?

The documentary was aired many times on Swedish TV—and it was viewed each time by millions of people. The response was incredibly positive. We meet people in the street who tell us how meaningful it was to hear about belief in G-d.

I believe that it was shown so many times because people here want to find meaning in their lives. Sweden has the world’s highest recorded suicide rate. It is a very materialistic society—and there is a tremendous yearning to connect to something meaningful. Most Swedish people struggle with living without G-d. Can you imagine living with that incredible existential loneliness—not knowing if there is a purpose to life, or a reason to wake up in the morning?

I remember listening to a tape of the Rebbe’s very first Chasidic discourse, Basi L’gani, where he sets out his mission statement. The Rebbe talked about how Abraham “called in the name of G-d, G-d of the universe,” and explained that Abraham caused others to call in G-d’s name. And that’s when I realized: this is our shlichus! We have to make G-d known so that others will call in the name of G-d.

This reminded me again of my first yechidus with the Rebbe, where he asked about the Shema—which is a declaration about faith in G-d.

So in a sense, these challenges that we have give us an opportunity to make public the idea that there is a G-d, and that one cannot live a life of pure materialism, of emptiness.

Eli Wiesel once said: there is no one more lonely than a Jew without his G-d. And I would add to that that any man living without knowledge of G-d experiences an existential loneliness. Sweden is a country where many feel isolation and a general lack of soul, and many have identified a longing to connect with something more meaningful.

You’ve managed to raise a large Chasidic family in Sweden while fulfilling all of your community obligations. As a woman, a Chabad community leader and a mother, how did you set your priorities?

A few months after we came to Sweden, it was our son’s first birthday. So he wrote a beautiful letter (more like a scribble) to the Rebbe, and we added that it was his birthday, and his birthday resolution. We also wrote to the Rebbe that we were planning to put up a menorah in the center of town, the first public menorah in Scandinavia—an idea, by the way, that was frightening to Jews living here—many of them children of Holocaust survivors who were trying to hide their Jewishness.

We faxed this to the Rebbe, and his response was a. that our son should observe all the customs that Chasidim practice on a birthday, and b. that we’ll see amazing fruits [from the public menorah.]

At that time, what struck me was that the details of a Chasid’s education were no less important to the Rebbe than the big, public, community projects. And that our child’s education must be a primary focus at the same time as we are trying to reach thousands of Jews. I took that as a lesson on how to educate our children when we are juggling so many things, and to keep that focus.

And the menorah?

The menorah drew 500 people that first night of Chanukah, and it continues to draw even larger crowds every year. The symbol of Jewish eternity stands in Götaplatsen, the center of the city, in the most prominent square. That was the first public menorah in all of Scandinavia. Today there are menorahs in all of Scandinavia. It’s no longer the lonely isolated outpost it was back then. Now there are Chabad representatives in Denmark, Finland, Norway, and we have two more in Sweden—in Stockholm and Malmo. It is amazing to see the tremendous effect of Chabad all over Scandinavia.

To have a Chabad House, someone once said, means to have a Jewish home that is available for every Jew. And it’s particularly appreciated in a place like Sweden, where the whole concept of spirituality is like water in the desert.

More than 20 years later, you have the benefit of perspective. Tell me about the personal satisfaction you take from your life’s work.

We have the joy of seeing Jewish people getting involved in Jewish life, studying Torah, taking on mitzvahs, and there is tremendous joy in this because the Rebbe taught us to appreciate the power of these single acts of mitzvahs.

Look, there’s an enormous transformation taking place in the Jewish world today—thousands are rediscovering their heritage, they are walking through the doors of Chabad Houses across the world, they are lighting up from the chance to be part of a Pesach seder, putting on tefilin for the first time, learning the Alef Bet. To have the privilege to watch what is happening is incredible.