Good afternoon ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for coming to this opening of the exhibition Jewish Life and Culture in Norway: Wergeland’s legacy. As the ambassador of Norway I am very pleased that the Tolerance Centre of Vilna Gaon State Jewish Museum and the Oslo Jewish Museum have chosen to show this exhibition and make it available to a Lithuanian crowd.

The Jewish community in Norway has historically not been very large. But even so the history of the Jews, also in Norway, needs to be told and this exhibition is an instrument for doing so. The Director of the Oslo Jewish Museum, Ms. Sissel Levin, will go more into detail about this and the background of the exhibition, but let me just mention a few point as an introduction. When Norway separated from Denmark and got its own constitution in 1814 it was a very liberal and forward looking document except in one important respect. Article 2 of that constitution made clear that Jews were not allowed into the country. It is a sad fact that this was also the case in other countries in Europe. This article in the constitution caused great controversy at the time. The person in the forefront in the struggle to remove the article from the Constitution was Henrik Wergeland. He is probably the greatest poet Norway has ever had, but he also contributed on many other levels such as language, culture and politics.

Due to Wergeland’s efforts the ill famous article in our constitution was removed from our constitution and as of 1851 Jews were allowed to establish themselves in Norway. Sadly Wergeland did not live to see the constitution amended. He died 6 years earlier at the age of 37. Today the Norwegians cherish Wergeland’s heritage of tolerance and compassion and promote it at home and abroad.

In numbers the Jewish community in Norway reached its peak in the 1930’s, with about 2100 members. By the outbreak of the Second World War the number of Jews in Norway had reached about 2100. Many had fled from horrible pogroms. Quite a few came from Vilnius and Kaunas. Two very well-known Norwegian Jews with roots in Lithuania are Leon Bodd, who received Lithuania’s 13 January medal for his contributions to Lithuania’s independence struggle in 1990-1991, and Jo Benkow, a prominent conservative who became speaker of the Norwegian Parliament.

The atrocities towards Jews during the Second World War also struck Norway.760 Norwegian Jews were deported, of them only 25 survived. The rest of the Norwegian Jews were able to flee the country, mostly to Sweden. After the war the Jewish community counted approximately 550 persons.

Today the Jews in Norway count about 1500 and are one of our five national minorities. Even if the Wergeland legacy of religious and ethnic tolerance is strong in Norway, examples of anti-Semitism occur too often. The synagogue in Oslo has been vandalised several times. This is just one of the many reasons why the history of the Jews in Norway and Europe must be told and retold. The history of the Jews is important for all of us. The exhibition gives us an insight into both the darker sides of Jewish history in Norway and the good days of everyday life, and lives of normal people.

I would like to thank the Tolerance centre of The Vilna Gaon State Jewish Museum and the Oslo Jewish Museum for organizing this important exhibition and for the excellent cooperation we had had in its preparation. And I’m very pleased that the Director of the Oslo Jewish Museum, Ms. Sissel Levin, has come from Oslo to give us a better understanding of the aims of the exhibitions and the history of the Jews in Norway. If there is a family in Norway we as Norwegians associate with culture it is the Levin family.

As a little token of our appreciation for the exhibition I have the pleasure to offer you two copies of the book “Tolerance and Compassion: Henrik Wergeland and his Legacy. And I end with asking the same question as my foreign Minister in the foreword:Have we become more tolerant? How can we extend the “frontiers of hope” which Wergeland saw as a fundamental condition for human progress?

Thank you