(JTA) — REYKJAVIK, Iceland —This city in the autumn of 1935 was a small fishing port of corrugated-iron houses battered by high winds, cod trawlers idling in the harbor, and geothermal steam curling up from hot springs that would one day heat the whole city. Fewer than 30,000 people lived there. There was no concert hall, no real orchestra, and no conservatory worth the name.

Onto this isolated island, in late 1935, stepped a 22-year-old pianist from Berlin named Robert Abraham. He carried almost nothing with him and hoped no one would ask too many questions about why he had left Germany.

He wasn’t the only one. Three years later, a Viennese conductor named Victor Urbancic disembarked with his Jewish wife, Melitta, after years of trying and failing to find a safe harbor elsewhere in Europe. And somewhere in between came Heinz Edelstein, a cellist and teacher from the German town of Freiburg, who arrived with his wife and two sons.

None of them had chosen Iceland. For a classically trained European musician fleeing the Nazis, an island near the Arctic Circle with no symphony orchestra and a government hostile to Jewish immigration was about as far from a dream destination as it got. Yet Urbancic, Abraham, and Edelstein went on to build the institutions that still define Icelandic classical music today.

Iceland is a nation that has always known how to keep its stories alive, from the medieval sagas to the living oral traditions that shaped its literature and language. But its more recent history of Jewish exile has gone largely untold for nearly a century until now — as scholars have worked both to recover the music that Nazi persecution scattered across the globe and reconstruct an Icelandic musical history that offers a painful reminder of the country’s Holocaust history.

The musicians’ story is the subject of a newly translated book, “Music at World’s End: Three Refugee Musicians from Nazi Germany and Their Contribution to Iceland’s Music Life,” by Icelandic musicologist Árni Heimir Ingólfsson. It was published in English this year by SUNY Press following the Icelandic edition in 2024.

The book reconstructs the three refugees’ individual pathways to Iceland. Urbancic was born in Vienna in 1903 and trained as a pianist, composer, and conductor at the Vienna Conservatory, working his way through theaters in Mainz and Graz. He was raised Catholic, but his wife, Melitta, came from a Jewish family, and under the Nazis, that was enough to end his career. After doors closed on him in Switzerland and the United States, an old classmate helped him find a foothold in Iceland in 1938.

Abraham’s path was more solitary. Born in Berlin in 1912, the son of musicologist Otto Abraham, he trained at the Berlin Hochschule für Musik before fleeing Germany in 1934, at age 22. Denmark turned him down. In late 1935, he sailed for Iceland alone and was advised to settle first in the fishing town of Akureyri, in the north.

Edelstein’s journey looked different from the start, a father bringing his family into exile rather than a young man traveling light.

“Today, there are as many as 100 descendants of these three men living in Iceland,” Ingólfsson said in an interview.

Their arrival was never guaranteed. At least four other Jewish musicians, including composer Viktor Ullmann, who would later die in Auschwitz, applied for Icelandic work permits around the same time and were turned away under a government that had largely closed the door to Jewish immigration. At the time, Icelandic immigration policies were very restrictive, similar to Denmark’s policies before and during the war. Iceland was a poor country with economic hardship, and antisemitism also played a role.

“Iceland is small and isolated, and in a place like that, xenophobia takes root easily,” Ingólfsson said. “The country was struggling economically, which fed suspicion of foreigners, and there was a prime minister who, on his own authority, closed the country to Jews entirely.”

Yet that same isolation created a practical need for what these three men could offer. “Iceland was pushing toward full independence from Denmark, and we felt we needed our own institutions to be taken seriously as a nation,” Ingólfsson said. “Musically, we still had a long way to go. … These three musicians arrived at exactly the right moment, despite the antisemitism.”

One more factor may have eased their acceptance, Ingólfsson said: By the time they reached Iceland, none of the three was a practicing Jew.

Abraham had been raised Protestant by his Jewish parents; he was no longer religious, according to Ingólfsson. Urbancic’s wife was Jewish, but he was not. And Edelstein had become an atheist.

“That made them easier for Icelanders to accept,” Ingólfsson said.

The three were admitted based on luck, timing, and getting their cases in front of the right people.

“In a way, it happened in a very Icelandic way,” said Ingólfsson. “They were lucky; instead of an automatic no, their applications were forwarded on based on people who knew people.”

Tina Frühauf of the CUNY Graduate Center, who studies Jewish music in the modern era, noted that Jewish identity across pre-Holocaust Europe was far from monolithic, meaning that many emigres had biographies like the Iceland refugees’.

“Before the Holocaust, Germany had an incredibly diverse Jewish religious landscape, and that diversity carried over into the migration itself,” she said.

What happened next still seems improbable. Urbancic became chief conductor of the Reykjavík Orchestra, the ensemble that, by 1950, had grown into the Iceland Symphony Orchestra, and led the country’s first performances of Bach’s “St. John Passion” and Mozart’s “Requiem,” and, in 1951, its first staged opera, Verdi’s “Rigoletto.” He also taught piano and theory at the Reykjavík School of Music and played the organ in the city’s only Catholic church.

Abraham became a central figure in Icelandic choral music. He conducted the Iceland Symphony Orchestra’s first-ever concert in 1950, founded the Philharmonia Choral Society in 1959, and earned a doctorate in musicology, eventually serving as director of music for the Church of Iceland — a long way from the young man who had arrived in Akureyri with one suitcase and instructions to keep a low profile. Edelstein, meanwhile, helped build the music schools and teaching pipelines that a country with no conservatory tradition simply didn’t have.

“They essentially created it,” Ingólfsson said of Iceland’s classical music scene. “People often ask why a country this small punches so far above its weight musically. Part of it is training, but just as important is a willingness to do the work. These three men set their egos aside. They were multi-talented and willing to take on any role — training orchestras, building choirs, teaching children — not just performing or conducting.”

That willingness, Ingólfsson argued, wasn’t incidental. A country with no infrastructure needed people willing to do five jobs at once, for little money and less glory. Urbancic, Edelstein, and Abraham fit that need because their old lives had already been upended. They weren’t protecting professional reputations, they were starting over.

Despite its impact, the story sat largely untold for decades, even in Iceland. Ingólfsson stumbled into it by chance. “It came to me by accident — about 25 years ago, an editor in Iceland approached me with the idea,” he said. “I was in graduate school at Harvard, so I researched and wrote much of it during my summer break.”

He published three newspaper profiles of the men in 2001, then set the project aside for two decades before finally turning it into a full book — work that meant tracking down archives, and just as often, tracking down people.

“I got in touch with the musicians’ families and met each of their children,” he said. “It’s a small world, and one connection led to another. Having that access early on made all the difference.”

One connection led somewhere unexpected and miraculous. While researching Abraham, Ingólfsson learned that the young musician had once been engaged to a non-Jewish woman who stayed behind in Berlin when he fled, and that he sent her care packages for years. Ingólfsson tracked down her daughter and wrote to her cold. “I’m writing a biography of your mother’s ex-boyfriend,” he told her. “She was overjoyed,” he recalled. “I met her in Hamburg, and she handed me a box of letters. That daughter became a second grandmother to me.”

So why did the story take so long to surface? “There’s still a tendency to tell the stories of our own,” Ingólfsson said. “Yes, these men did extraordinary work, but they were foreigners. Musicology is also a fairly new field in Iceland; there are only three or four musicologists in the whole country.”

Recognition is arriving now: Weeks ago, the Exile Museum in Berlin launched a series with foreign embassies, each spotlighting a refugee story tied to their country, and Iceland was chosen to go first.

Set against the wider history of Jewish musical exile, Iceland is an extreme case of an ordinary pattern. Musicians fleeing Nazi Europe scattered unevenly across the globe, and what happened to them next often depended on little more than where an immigration officer happened to say yes.

“Exile happened in very different ways,” Frühauf said. “Some musicians were actively forced out, threatened with internment, and some were even interned before being released. Others left earlier, and where they ended up varied enormously — America, Singapore, all over the world.”

The German musicologist Albrecht Dümling, meanwhile, saw his research take him to Australia, where nearly 100 German-Jewish refugee musicians landed, some of whom, after fleeing the Nazis, were deported there by the British, who considered them “enemy aliens.”

“They were horrified, as they had come as Jewish refugees to Britain and had hoped to be in a safe country,” he said of men sent aboard the prison ship Dunera in 1940. “They could not believe that in England they had been interned, and this was continued in Australia as well. Some were very depressed. But others saw their internment as a challenge to write songs that made clear their opposition to Hitler’s Germany.”

What separated musicians who thrived from those who vanished, Dümling said, often had less to do with talent than paperwork: Refugees in Iceland typically weren’t permitted to resume their old careers, a fate Urbancic, Edelstein, and Abraham avoided only because Iceland’s need for musicians overrode the usual restrictions.

Frühauf sees Iceland’s relative obscurity as instructive rather than incidental. “Smaller countries of exile are exactly where you find figures who’ve been overlooked,” she said. “Because exiles were so widely dispersed, many remain unknown simply due to geography.”

All three scholars described a sense of urgency, with the window for hearing these stories firsthand closing fast. “As eyewitnesses to the Nazi era pass away, hopes are pinned on the second generation,” Dümling said, “but the publication of personal memoirs, letters, and diaries written by these eyewitnesses is also taking on greater significance.”

That urgency comes with an ethical balancing act, Frühauf said. Recover the work too cautiously, and the story behind the music stays lost; recover it carelessly, and real artists risk being seen merely as symbols of suffering. “We have to avoid reducing these artists to simply victims or survivors, and instead make sure their music is valued on its own artistic merit,” she said. “The goal isn’t only to recover lost works, it’s to bring these musicians back into the canon.”

For Ingólfsson, the project has become something closer to a rescue than a research assignment, a chance to explain to the country that has been hearing this music for so many years, where so much of it actually came from.

“What strikes me most is the sheer randomness of it, how much depended on one person knowing another, often in events far outside Iceland,” he said. “These men were growing desperate in the 1930s, trying everything to get out. For a classical musician, Iceland was hardly a dream destination. And yet they turned something depressing and unfortunate into something extraordinary. It’s a very Icelandic story.”

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(JTA) — A crowded field of candidates will compete in South Carolina’s special primary this Tuesday, with hopes of securing the Republican nomination for a U.S. Senate seat long held by the late Lindsey Graham, one of Israel’s strongest allies on Capitol Hill and an advocate for military action against Iran.

There is little doubt that the winner will be supportive of Israel, but it remains to be seen just how high the Jewish state will rank among the candidate’s priorities. Matching Graham’s level of foreign policy experience and focus on the Middle East, a region he often visited, would be difficult.

“If other people are quite that hawkish, then they just don’t have the platform and power to say it. Whereas, he did,” Scott Huffmon, a professor of political science at South Carolina’s Winthrop University, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

Graham died suddenly on July 11 from an aortic dissection, at 71 years old, after serving 23 years in the Senate and eight in the U.S. House. He was a longstanding member of the Senate’s Armed Services and Budget committees and had traveled to Israel about a dozen times since Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023 attack on Israel.

Having grown up in the Cold War era, Graham was an anti-Soviet and then anti-Russia conservative who was always solidly pro-Israel, said Huffmon, who also directs Winthrop’s Center for Public Opinion and Policy Research.

“He viewed peace in the Middle East through the lens of a protected Israel,” Huffmon said, noting that Graham made Israel a priority issue. “It would be really tough for a new person to have the traction to do that, even if they believe just as strongly as the late Senator Graham.”

Just a few days after his death, South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster, a Republican, appointed the late senator’s younger sister, Darline Graham, to complete the rest of his term. Despite having only limited policy experience, such as previously serving on the South Carolina Commission for the Blind, she quickly earned President Trump’s endorsement and announced she would be running in Tuesday’s special primary.

Graham will be up against nine fellow Republicans, with her biggest challengers including Ralph Norman and Russell Fry, who are both currently serving in Congress, as well as Mark Sanford and Mark Lynch.

A recent Emerson College poll showed Graham and Norman vying for the lead, with 19% and 22% support, respectively, while Fry had 12%. Sanford is a former congressman and South Carolina governor, while Lynch is a businessman.

Among Norman’s top priorities is the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act (SAVE America Act), a bill he co-sponsored in the U.S. House that would require voters to provide identification at the polls – and a top priority for Trump. He also has pledged to reduce spending, secure the U.S. borders, fund law enforcement, protect gun ownership rights, restrict women’s sports to assigned females at birth, support veterans and strengthen the military.

“We should be slow to send America’s sons and daughters into harm’s way, but when we do, they deserve every advantage to accomplish the mission and return home safely,” the campaign stated.

Darline Graham revealed her platforms less than a week ago on Fox News, noting that the SAVE America Act is her first co-sponsored bill in the U.S. Senate. Her other policies were similar to those on Norman’s list, though she also expressed specific support for the right to life, She slams diversity, equity and inclusion, and two bugbears of the left: progressive leader Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York and Anthony Fauci, the former top federal health official Republicans say bungled the COVID pandemic. Graham earned the backing of the Republican Jewish Coalition shortly after announcing her candidacy.

Fry’s campaign also promotes the Trump-branded “America First” agenda, focusing on securing borders, ending the fentanyl crisis, lowering costs, advocating for farmers and rural communities, honoring veterans, confronting China’s communist party and advancing U.S. oil, gas and nuclear energy development.

Sanford’s top priority, as highlighted in bold and red on his website, is the “nation’s debt and the spending that drives it.” His campaign focuses on reversing the “financial tipping point” that has threatened the country’s “ability to sustain the American Dream.” Sanford, whose governorship was plagued with scandals, briefly ran against Trump in the 2020 presidential primaries.

Lynch’s focuses are fairly similar to those of Norman, Graham and Fry, with stronger language on foreign policy that demands a “lethal military focused on defending the homeland,” an end to “American involvement in open-ended foreign conflicts” and formal congressional authorization for new military engagements.

Israel has not been an active issue in the campaign.

Although Graham earned Trump’s endorsement, Huffmon said that supporters of Norman and Fry also see them as candidates who “will help push Trump’s agenda.” Norman has a strong track record and statewide recognition as a fiscal conservative, while Fry has “solid conservative bona fides” but less notability, according to Huffmon.

In his own past polls of South Carolina Republicans, Huffmon said he found that the most conservative voters tended to have high approval ratings for Trump, McMaster and former governor Nikki Haley, but they saw Lindsey Graham as “too moderate.”

“The people who want the Trump agenda to succeed the most were not always Graham’s biggest fan,” he added. “So they might not automatically say, ‘Well, Graham’s sister is the natural candidate.’”

Christopher Cooper, a political science professor at Western Carolina University,  predicted that “she will be fairly close to her brother on most issues,” noting that this is in some ways “her feature as a candidate.” But like Huffmon, he stressed that “Lindsey Graham was not that popular,” even if he was expected to win reelection.

That said, Huffmon stressed that South Carolina “is still a conservative, Trump supporting state” and that “his endorsement still matters a lot.”

Cooper agreed. “I think you’d rather have it than not have it, but it’s no longer a guarantee for victory,” he said.

The Emerson poll — which included about 500 GOP primary voters — also asked respondents what issues the next senator of South Carolina should prioritize. Just 3.5% chose foreign policy, while 59.5% picked the economy, 18.7% immigration, 8.3% healthcare and 10% “something else.” On the other hand, 56.1% said they “strongly support” U.S. military action in Iran, with only 14.6% voicing strong opposition.

Huffmon said that when a poll asks for a voter’s top priority, the respondent’s second most important issue could be “millimeters behind,” but they can only name one. Voters right now might feel like a strong foreign policy approach “is necessary but not sufficient,” he said.

Huffmon characterized Israel as “a threshold issue,” meaning that voters would view anti-Israel, pro-Palestinian sentiments as disqualifying factors, but the issue is not as high priority in comparison to other concerns, like the economy.

Cooper agreed. “GOP voters are going to be fairly hawkish, but if you ask any group of people right now, what’s your most important issue, it’s going to be the economy,” he said.

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(JTA) — Michigan rabbis and other Jewish figures delivered a petition to the head of the state’s Democratic Party Monday urging him to “ensure the safety” of all Jewish delegates at the state party’s upcoming convention, underscoring anxieties about growing antisemitism in the state’s blue coalition.

The petition, whose total signatories numbered around 200, comes days after Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel, who is Jewish, announced she would not be attending the Aug. 29 convention out of fear of being targeted for harassment.

“We believe you need to make it clear, publicly, that anyone who chases, screams at, or otherwise harasses Jews at your convention will be arrested and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law,” reads the petition, delivered to Curtis Hertel, Jr., the state party chair.

Citing Nessel’s comments, the letter continues, “If Jews — including the highest-ranking Jewish state official in Michigan — are intimidated into staying away from your convention, it will not stop there.”

Among the clergy who signed the letter at press time are five rabbis who actively lead congregations in the state, representing Reform, Conservative and Humanistic denominations. Those include Amy Bigman of Congregation Shaarey Zedek in East Lansing; Aaron Starr of Congregation Shaarey Zedek in Southfield, a Detroit suburb; Nadav Caine of Beth Israel Congregation in Ann Arbor; Natalie Shribman of Temple Kol Ami in West Bloomfield; and Jeffrey Falick of the Congregation for Humanistic Judaism of Metro Detroit, in Farmington Hills.

The vast majority of signatories hailed from outside the state, including Rafael Medoff, director of the David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies, who organized and delivered the petition to Hertel; Rabbi Etan Tokayer, president of the Rabbinical Council of America, an Orthodox rabbinical network; Jewish historian and Zionist commentator Gil Troy; and several other rabbis and Jewish academics across the country.

The letter did not mention Abdul El-Sayed, the party’s newly minted U.S. Senate nominee in Michigan. But the state’s Jewish Democrats have been on edge with El-Sayed’s rhetoric on both Israel and local matters of Jewish safety, including what they believe was his equivocal response to the Temple Israel attack in March in West Bloomfield. No rabbis affiliated with Temple Israel had signed the Hertel petition as of press time.

El-Sayed, a former county health official, appeared to acknowledge the concerns in his victory speech last week. “My commitment to Jewish safety is the same commitment that I have to the safety of my own daughters,” he said.

A number of Jewish Democratic leaders are not yet convinced, and many believe the threat of antisemitism within the party has become more acute with his rise.

“Acceptance or tolerance of antisemitism in Democratic spaces must also come to an end, and this requires clear action, not just words, on the part of El-Sayed,” Halie Soifer, chair of the Jewish Democratic Council of America and a Michigan native, wrote in a JDCA statement Friday.

Soifer called on El-Sayed to “stand with and defend Nessel and other Jewish Democrats,” noting that JDCA would focus its campaign season on helping elect “Democrats who share our values.” She added, “The Jewish vote is a critical component of a winning Democratic coalition, including in Michigan, and it’s not something that can be taken for granted.” More than 100,000 Jews live in Michigan, a swing state, and two thirds identify as Democrats, according to a 2020 Brandeis University population survey.

The Michigan Jewish Democratic Caucus, too, recently said El-Sayed’s campaign “must commit to … rejecting rhetoric that demonizes the Jewish civic identity.”

An El-Sayed campaign spokesperson did not immediately respond to a Jewish Telegraphic Agency request for comment on Nessel and antisemitism. Nessel has been targeted by pro-Palestinian activists in the state, who rallied against her ultimately unsuccessful efforts to prosecute encampment protesters at the University of Michigan.

The state’s last Democratic convention, in April, was marred by what many of its Jewish attendees said was a toxic environment that included nominating an attorney with a social media history of praising Hezbollah and far-right conspiracist Candace Owens to the ballot for the University of Michigan board of regents. Attendees also booed U.S. Rep. Haley Stevens, El-Sayed’s pro-Israel primary rival; a third candidate, state Sen. Mallory McMorrow, alleged that some attendees directed antisemitic remarks at her Jewish husband.

In her recent statement, Soifer said El-Sayed’s supporters had “created a hostile environment” at that convention. The candidate has said he directed his supporters not to boo anyone in April.

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