We’re just finishing up a wonderful birthday trip (for Alexandra and Naomi) to Budapest and thought I would share a few reflections.
Budapest felt like a real meeting of East and West, old and contemporary. As one person shared, it’s as far east as westerners use to travel and as far west as Eastern Europeans would travel. It was an interesting melange of beautiful grand architecture from the Austrian-Hungarian empire, communist functional buildings and contemporary glass buildings. There were avant-garde galleries and cafes and markets mixed with traditional buildings and culture. And amongst the falling down buildings, there has developed a tradition of ruin bars where hip bars have sprung up attracting party goers from everywhere.
Hungary had a prewar Jewish population of 800,000 with 625,000 of them in Budapest and 600,000 being killed in the Shoah. 100,000 Jews were liberated from the Budapest two ghettos and 25,000 came out of hiding. This was the only ghetto to be liberated. All others were fully liquidated. Before the war, the Jewish population of Budapest was 25-33% of the population with a much high representation in all the professions and as business owners. The Jewish population of today is between 95,000-120,000 Jews depending on who you ask and how you count. There is a definite presence of Jews in the city and one of the few native prewar European Jewish populations. There are 23 functioning synagogues, a Jewish theater, schools, JCC , kosher restaurants and tons of Jewish organizations, ranging from historic to start ups. There are many young Jews recently learning their Jewish from grandparents who kept it hidden during the communist era. And as explained to me, anywhere you go in Budapest, you’re never far from the Holocaust. And the Jewish community clearly paid an important role building the city and its intellectual life.
While much of Budapest Jewish community has been secular for over a century, Hungary is also the birthplace of Neolog Judaism (an attempt to embrace some of the social norms of Hungarian culture without much religious change, beginning in the mid 19th century), hard line reactionary Haredi Judaism and a middle group called Status Quo-Ante (which ironically Chabad claims to now be the descendent of as a way to benefit from government funding and restituted Holocaust property). Neolog institutions include the main Dohany synagogue (finished in 1859 before the Jews were emancipated in Hungary) and the rabbinical school which was started in 1870 and is affiliated with JTS. It was mind blowing how large and magnificent some of the synagogues are and others are still under repair for damage from the war. We managed to get to the rabbinical school and chat with one of the rabbinical students who shared with us two of the main issues facing Neolog is the role of women (currently they can only give the sermon) and intermarriage. Clearly women’s involvement and wearing kippot and tallitot are very political.
We went to a reform havurah kabbalat Shabbat, Neolog Shabbat morning (complete with organ and choir and separate seating) and Shabbat dinner at the kosher restaurant (where many of our fellow diners were haredi) – getting to see very different parts of the community.
There is a robust arts culture in Budapest with opera, ballet and incredible intellectual life. And the baths – we only managed to make it to two of them but definitely appreciated it.
And then there are the politics with its current fascist government and resurgence of Anti-semitism.