Surviving against all odds? The urban practice of orthodox refugees and Holocaust survivors in Stockholm, 1939–1950s

With Adass Jeschurun, an orthodox synagogue transported from Hamburg to Stockholm in 1939, as a gateway, this article endeavours to reconstruct the lives of orthodox Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany and Holocaust survivors in Sweden during and after World War II. To do this, the article operationalizes Henri Lefebvre’s triad of space to first, explore the synagogue’s current narrative of survival against all odds and second, move beyond this memory to reconstruct the urban experience of orthodox Jews affected by the Holocaust. Architectural and spatial-emotional methods are used to analyse the fragmented material available. The result shows that practitioners of Adass Jeschurun initially would have felt peripheral to Stockholm’s already established Jewish population, and that the narrative materialized to keep the synagogue’s othering identity in times of religious change and communal integration. Thus, the article also suggests that the memory of Holocaust survivors was appropriated for inner-communal politics.