Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Culture

VIDEO: Jewish Communities Reach the Finnish Line

Dina Kantor grew up in Minneapolis to a Jewish father and a Finnish mother who had converted. Her Jewish and Finnish worlds were quite separate but, in 2006, she went to Finland to explore the Finnish Jewish communities of Helsinki and Turku. Originally treating it as part of her MFA program at the School of the Visual Arts in New York, Kantor became engrossed in the subject. No longer a snapshot of this tiny community (only 1,500 people from the Finnish population of 5 million), her ongoing project provides the audience with a portrait over time.

At first sight, showing the daily life of Finland’s Jewish community is secondary to the clean Scandinavian aesthetics of Kantor’s images. Nevertheless, on the closer inspection invited by the elegance and openness of the photographs, these intimate portraits suggest deeper stories which she shared with me recently.

Below, listen to our interview and view Kantor’s arresting photographs:

Finnish and Jewish from Jewish Daily Forward on Vimeo.

Kantor’s exhibition, Finnish and Jewish, is at the Blue Sky Gallery in Portland, Ore. until November 1.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.