One place where one cannot find a minyan is Greenland. In fact, the country appears to have but a sole permanent Jewish resident, Paul Cohen of Wisconsin, who lives with his wife in the remote village of Narsaq. Since the president-elect is considering expanding the American republic to include this vast island territory, it seems worth revisiting Dan Fellner’s profile of Cohen from August 2023:
There has never been an organized Jewish community in Greenland, other than the U.S. military base at Thule in far northwestern Greenland. Vilhjálmur Örn Vilhjálmsson, an Icelandic-born historian and former senior researcher at the Danish Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, wrote a chapter about Jewish life in Greenland in the 2019 book Antisemitism in the North, which originally appeared in a Danish journal called Rambam.
Vilhjálmsson writes that “there were certainly Jews among the first Dutch whalers in the 16th and 17th centuries.” But there were no definitive reports of Jewish life in Greenland until World War II, when the United States established a military base in Thule, which is just 950 miles from the North Pole.
In the 1950s, there were more than 50 Jewish servicemen stationed in Thule at one time. Passover seders and services were held for Shabbat and high holidays, at the time giving Greenland the distinction, Vilhjálmsson writes, of “having the northernmost minyan in the world.”
Cohen says few Jewish tourists come to Narsaq, but when they do visit, they have a way of finding him.
Read more on JTA: https://www.jta.org/2023/08/15/global/the-only-jew-in-remote-greenland-sometimes-feels-like-the-last-person-on-earth