Yet Urbancic, Abraham, and Edelstein went on to build the institutions that still define Icelandic classical music today. “Today, there are as many as 100 descendants of these three men living in Iceland,” Ingólfsson said in an interview. 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’. “They essentially created it,” Ingólfsson said of Iceland’s classical music scene. Urbancic, Edelstein, and Abraham fit that need because their old lives had already been upended.