Jews of Hungary
Hungary had one of the largest Jewish communities in
Europe, but in the environment I grew up in the Yiddish-speaking
world of the Eastern European shtetl was quite alien, yet so was the
German and American Reform Jewish world that updated Jewish
practices. My family kept a kosher home. My grandfather davened
shachrit and put on t’fillin every day. The peculiar character of
Hungarian Jewry grew out of the compromise that the Hungarian Jewish
communities arrived at with the rulers of Hungary towards the end of
the eighteenth century; if the Jews would adopt
the Magyar
[Hungarian] language they would be given equal rights with other
Hungarian citizens.
Jews had lived in Hungary since Roman times.
Inscriptions, references to Jews, date back to the time of the
Emperor Marcus Aurelius in 175 AD. There were numerous Jewish
settlements in the Roman province of Pannonia.
A two-room
Sephardic synagogue from 1364
Some Jews held high offices and in the Middle Ages1,
Jews fleeing from persecution in Bohemia and other parts of Europe
found shelter in Hungary. Over the years Jews were alternately
welcomed and driven out. Jews were found to be useful and were at
times accorded privileges, but were always at the whim of the local
ruler or magnate. Edicts against Jews were sometimes enforced only half-heartedly because the value of having Jews around with commercial
and financial skills was all too clear. But even where Jews were
tolerated they were subject to special and often excessive taxes and
various restrictions.
Then in 1790-91, during the enlightened reign of the
Emperor Joseph II, all edicts against Jews were suspended. There were
conditions however. All legal documents had to be written in Latin,
German or Hungarian, the languages of the empire, and documents
written in Hebrew or Yiddish were deemed invalid. Jews had to give up
their distinctive garbs, shave their beards and had to assume German
surnames. Jews were also required to establish schools, which had to
follow the same curriculum as other schools. Granting Jews equal
rights was one of the touchstones that defined humanism in the 18th
century and subsequently. These rights accorded to Jews were
withdrawn again after the return to clerical absolutism, a reaction
to the French Revolution. But the idea that Jews should be granted
the rights of citizens lingered, and in 1839 – 40 the law De
Judaeis of Joseph II, promulgated in 1791 was
reaffirmed.
Jews took to being Hungarian with great enthusiasm2.
Within a generation some of the most popular Hungarian playwrights,
journalists, humorists, poets and novelists were Jewish.
Chatam Sofer
However, the greatest of Hungarian rabbis, the great
halachic authority of the first half of the 19th
century, Moses Sofer, known as the Chatam Sofer, chief rabbi of
Pressburg, later known as Pozsony, and today’s Bratislava, foresaw
the problems of assimilation and fiercely resisted all compromise,
all concessions to secular society.
Opposed to Reform and the influence of Moses Mendelssohn
in Germany, for him the only acceptable
form of Judaism
was Judaism as previously
practiced. In his view, the rules and tenets of Judaism had never
changed — and cannot ever change. This became the defining idea for
the opponents to Reform, and in some form, it has continued to
influence the Orthodox response to innovation in Jewish doctrine and
practice3.
The majority of the Jews of Hungary, however, embraced
the Neologue form of Judaism, which didn't depart much in practice
from tradition, but conformed to the role of churches in Hungarian
society. Jews were Hungarians in every respect, but they happened to
worship in synagogues rather than churches4.
That the Jews identified as Hungarians, became important
in defining Hungary as a country of Hungarians in a land where
Hungarians were scarcely a majority among the many ethnic groups.
Jews held the ethnic balance. During the 1848 uprising against
Hapsburg rule, Jews played a prominent part and suffered a
disproportionate number of casualties. The Hapsburg rulers imposed,
as punishment, special and particularly onerous taxes on the Jewish
community, and these were only rescinded when new era of compromise
and liberalism swept through the Hapsburg Empire in the wake of its
defeat in Italy.
Yet the decade of absolutism in Hungary (1849–1859)
was in a way beneficial to the Jews. It forced them to establish
schools, most of which were in charge of trained teachers who taught
the Hungarian school curriculum. With secular education the doors
were open to Jews to enter the mainstream of Hungarian society. But
as they became more Hungarian they became less distinctively Jewish.
They dressed like Hungarians, they cooked food, even if kosher, with
a Hungarian flavour, their musical tastes blended with Hungarian
gypsy music, and they expected their rabbis to preach in Hungarian.
My great-grandfather, as a prominent shopkeeper of his
suburb, the then 9th
district, was one of the founders of the synagogue in Pava Street,
which is now the Budapest Holocaust museum.
The founders agreed that like all the large prestigious
synagogues in Budapest, it should be a Neologue synagogue. It was
built in an oriental style with a dome and stars on the blue ceiling.
The divisive issues in the planning were: whether to have an organ in
the synagogue and to require the Rabbi who was appointed to deliver
his sermons in Hungarian. Though a Neologue synagogue, they came down
on the side of traditional practices, the bimah in the middle of the
synagogue, no organ, no musical instruments used in the services. The
synagogue had a male voice choir, conducted in my time by the
fearsome Mr. Gottschall, a gnome like angry looking little man, an
uncle of Rabbi Gotschall who was the rabbi of Wellington for some
years in the 1950s. Mr. Gottschall conducted with a tuning fork like
the choirmasters of old, and for a few weeks I had the privilege of
joining his choir. I was issued with a cassock, like a good choirboy,
but was told on no account to sing, just pretend, until I became
familiar with the tunes and words and could blend in with the other
boys. The choir had four professional male singers, and the synagogue
had a cantor, a Mr. Tennenbaum, a large rotund man with a powerful
voice, who spoke with a broad Yiddish accent, which we children, with
our pristine Hungarian, found hilarious. But if he didn’t sound
Hungarian, he was certainly Hungarian enough to serve with the
Hungarian cavalry in the First World War. My career as a chorister
was cut short when the Germans invaded Hungary on March 19, 1944, and
it became too dangerous to go out to choir practices.
The rabbi, Rabbi Farkas, Wolf in Hungarian, like the
cantor Tennenbaum, spoke with a Yiddish accent. His Hungarian was not
good, and members of the congregation laughed at his mistakes , but
nevertheless he was much loved and respected, and served the
congregation from 1923, when the synagogue was built until 1944, when
he was murdered, shot on the bank of the Danube by one of his
ecclesiastical colleague, a Catholic priest.
The Hungarian roots of my family can only be traced back
to the 18th
century5.
My distant ancestors were listed as tax payers of Gyönk in Tolna
County in 1730, the time when the Gyönk Jewish community was
founded.
At the beginning of the 18th
century, when the Grosz and Lorschy families settled in Tolna County,
Hungary was, a depopulated backward province of the Hapsburg Empire
century. There was a great need for more people to settle the land,
and in particular, for people with skills. Jews, among them my
ancestors, saw opportunities in Hungary. The owners of the vast
estates of Tolna County, a rich wine-growing region, in Transdanubia,
south of lake Balaton, brought in people from Schwabia and Moravia,
and among these a number of Jews, including my distant ancestors6.
The owners of the huge estates needed not only people to work the
land, but also some to process and market its produce. My great
grandfather, Salamon Grosz, was a wine wholesaler7.
With the large numbers of Germans, Gyönk was a
German-speaking town, and my grandfather could quote large chunks of
poetry by Goethe, Schiller and Heine in German well into his
eighties. But he also spoke Hungarian, He was well versed in
Hungarian literature, and speaking good idiomatic educated Hungarian
mattered to him and to my grandmother, a woman of little formal
education, but renowned for her perception and wisdom, who wanted her
daughters to be familiar with the classics, and in particular, the
complete works of Jokai, the Hungarian Dickens.
At the end of the 19th
century Hungary was a land of opportunities, a prosperous country,
even though there was great poverty, the peasants lived in virtually
serf-like conditions and the urban workers lived in overcrowded
slums. Budapest, the capital, was the fastest growing city in Europe
and the splendid buildings in the inner city date largely from that
period. Jews prospered and built large, lavish synagogues.
Jews migrated from the countryside to Budapest for
better lives. All four of my grandparents were born in country towns
and moved to Budapest when they were young, my maternal grandfather
moved there to attend the elite Presbyterian Gimnazium, where his
older brother preceded him, and one of the teachers came from his
home town, a huge honour for the town of Gyönk.
My paternal grandfather walked to Budapest from Cegléd
before he was Bar Mitzvah8.
He was apprenticed to an ironmonger. His father, my great-grandfather
was a cobbler who found it hard to provide for his 13 children and
all the boys left home young, my great-uncle walking all the way to
Munich before he was 13, where my great-grandfather’s brother was
not just a humble cobbler, but the boot maker to the Elector of
Bavaria. This great-uncle became a successful plumbing contractor.
When Hitler came to power he moved back to Hungary.
Jews had an important role in developing Hungary,
changing it from an agricultural backwater into an industrial state.
The forty years before the first world war, from the 1870s, was a
golden age for Hungarian Jews. Jews immersed themselves in every
aspect of Hungarian life, science, education, art and literature, and
sport.
There was, however, a dark side to this golden age. With
large numbers of workers moving to the newly industrialized Budapest,
many lived in extreme poverty. The urban poor included many Jews
fleeing to or just moving to Budapest from Galitzia, then part of
Russia. Us, established Jews of Budapest had little to do with them.
They had their own shtiebl, and our synagogue was the one they didn't
go to.
During the First World War Jews served in the army in
large numbers along with all Hungarians. One of my grandfather's
closest friends was a general, in command of a Hungarian regiment9.
My wife's, Judy's, uncles served as officers on the front. My
grandfather was luckier, he served as a sergeant in the palace
guards. In what other country would a Jew have served in such an
elite unit. There was no discrimination.
During the First World War a large proportion of the
Hungarian army ended up in Russian prisoner of war camps. There they
absorbed Bolshevik ideas. The leader of the Hungarian Bolsheviks was
Bela Kun, a journalist and rebel rouser, whose father was Jewish.
Many of the other prominent communists were also Jewish. After the
war the communists ousted the democratically elected government and
in 1919 set up a brutal Bolshevik regime, the second in Europe after
Russia. The communist government lasted only 133 days, but accounted
for a lot of deaths, expropriation and damage. It was driven out by a
rabid nationalist militia lead by Admiral Horthy, which blamed the
disaster of the Communist rule on the Jews. Horthy and his men came
to power on an extreme nationalist and antisemitic platform. On their
way to the capital they attacked Jews wherever they went. When they
marched through the 9th district my grandfather's friend,
the district police commander, warned my grandfather to stay indoors
and lock the doors, because the approaching thugs were killing Jews,
throwing them off balconies. Such was the beginning of the Horthy
era.
At the peace treaty after the First World War two-thirds
of the land area of Hungary and a third of its Hungarian population
ended up outside the Hungarian borders; in Rumania and in the new
states of Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia. For the next generation the
driving policy of Hungarian governments was to regain these
territories.
When the Austro-Hungarian empire was carved up the
ethnic balance that ensured stability was destroyed. Each ethnic
group had its own role in the empire. The Germans were the
craftsmen, Serbs the market gardeners, the Hungarian peasantry tilled
the soil, the Hungarian gentry and middle class were the
administrators of the empire and the Jews were responsible for
commerce and entrepreneurship. With the empire destroyed, other
ethnic minorities were largely incorporated in the newly established
states, Jews were the most visible remaining ethnic minority, and
they were very visible indeed. In 1921 the majority, perhaps 90% of
Hungarian industry was owned or operated by a few closely related
banking families. Members of the stock exchange and currency brokers
were predominantly Jewish. Jews represented a quarter of all
university students, 43% at the Budapest Technological University,
60% of the doctors, 51% of lawyers and 39% of privately employed
engineers and chemists, 34% of journalists and editors and 29% of
musicians were Jewish. To combat this imbalance the nationalist
regime of Horthy introduced legislation, the first anywhere in
Europe, limiting the number of Jews in higher education to 5%, their
percentage in the population at large. To further discourage Jewish
students, chauvinist Hungarian students aligned with right wing
politics attacked and beat up Jewish students at universities. One of
my childhood heroes was the brother of a friend of my parents, who
took a knuckle duster with him to class and when he was attacked he
floored his attacker with the knuckle duster and killed him. He was
on the train to Austria and then on the way to South America before
people realized what had happened. As a result of limiting Jews in
higher education, some of the greatest Jewish scientists and scholars
were driven out of the country. The smartest went abroad to study. My
uncle, a research chemist, went to Brno in Czechoslovakia to study,
his sister, equally brilliant, to Germany.
Gradually the more extreme supporters of Horthy were
replaced by more levelheaded politicians, many drawn from the old
aristocracy, with strong sense of public duty and integrity.
Stability returned. Budapest became again a beautiful city renowned
for good food, music and beautiful women. It was one of the favorite
cities of Edward, Prince of Wales, later Duke of Windsor. Jews hoped
that the upheavals in other parts of Europe would pass them by. They
continued to play a prominent role in business and commerce, in the
arts and literature, and even in sports. Five Olympic champions in
the Hungarian team at Hitler's Berlin Olympics in 1936 were Jewish
With the aim of regaining the lost territories of
'Greater Hungary' the Horthy government aligned itself, albeit
warily, with Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany to gain support for
Hungarian claims. This was reflected in the emergence and rise of new
fascist groups within the country. The influence of the German Nazis
fostered the deep-seated antisemitism that was never far from the
surface. Jews were not persecuted until late in the 1930s, but it
became harder for Jews to get jobs or get a licence to trade. My
father lost his position with a major car dealership during the
depression, and could not find another job. He was fortunate to get a
licence to trade and so could run a very modest wholesale business.
Towards the end of the 1930s my father could see the
danger looming for Jews and planned to get away. My uncle, a
successful electrical contractor, was advised to convert, because as
a Jew he was unlikely to get any further major contracts. One of the
newspapers ran a column about countries Jews might choose to go to.
My father was taken with the account of New Zealand. A new Labour
government had just been elected, with a programme of welfare, and
social justice. In the country described in the newspaper, there were
neither very rich, nor very poor. People lived in villas on quarter
acre sections. No one starved. It was paradise, the place where my
father wanted to live. He and my uncle applied for visas. My uncle's
was granted his, because, being an electrical engineer, his skills
were useful for rigging up the lights in Oriental Bay for the 1940
Centennial celebrations. My father had no special skills in demand,
his visa application remained in the Labour department's pending
file.
On March 12, 1938, German troops occupied Austria and
Austria was incorporated in the Reich. The Nazis judged the loyalty
of their allies by their treatment of Jews. On May 28 1938, two
months after the Anschluss, Hungary introduced the first anti-Jewish
law, which restricted the number of Jews in the professions. Then
they agonized over the implementation of the other provisions of the
Nuremberg laws, too many of the ruling elite had Jewish grandparents.
It took another year, May 1939, after the German occupation of
Czechoslovakia, before the second-Jewish law was passed, defining
Jews as anyone with at least two Jewish grandparents. The third
anti-Jewish law was passed two years later, August 1941, prohibiting
intermarriage between Jews and non-Jews.
Shortly before then almost 20,000 Jews, who could not
prove that their families had lived in Hungary since 1850, mostly
Polish and Russian Jews who had settled in the Transcarpathian region
of Ukraine under Hungarian control, were transferred to Southern
Poland, and were murdered soon after by a detachment of
Einsatzgruppen mobile killing units in Kaminets-Poldinskyi, the first
large-scale mass murder in pursuit of the Final Solution. This is
described in Elie Wiesel's fictional account, Night, where the
beadle, the shammes of the community witnesses the massacre, returns
to the village and tries to warn people of what is in store for them,
but nobody would believe him.
My grandfather's sister, Paola, came back to Budapest
from Vienna, after the German occupation of Austria, when her husband
was beaten so badly that he died soon after that from his injuries.
She stayed with my grandparents until all German citizens, including
Austrians, were required to report to the German embassy. My
great-aunt knew what that meant and was reluctant to go, but my
grandfather assured her that this was Hungary, where the rules of law
prevailed. With great reluctance, Paola went to the German embassy
and was never seen or heard of again.
But Hungarian Jews were safe for the time being. The
Hungarian government, despite insistence on the part of the Nazis,
refused to hand over its Jews, and even provided a haven for Jews
fleeing to Hungary from Slovakia and other German occupied lands.
This all changed on a beautiful spring Sunday,
March 19, 1944, when the Germans invaded Hungary. There was no
jubilation, as there was in Austria or the Sudetenland. It was not a
surprise, but more like something that people feared and accepted as
inevitable. Immediately a new puppet government was installed with an
Nazi and extreme antisemitic agenda. Adolf Eichmann arrived with the
first occupying troops together with his team of experts on the
annihilation of Jewish communities. The willing cooperation of the
Hungarian authorities surprised even these experienced officers.
Within three weeks the decision was made to deport all Jews, and laws
were passed making the wearing of yellow stars mandatory and the
decree to relocate in designated ghettos all Jews outside Budapest.
The destruction of the last remaining Jewish community in Europe was
a matter of high priority for the Nazis.
The plan was to use 45 cattle cars per train, 4 trains a
day, to deport 12,000 Jews to Auschwitz every day from the
countryside from mid-May, and this was to be followed on 15 July with
the deportation of Jews from Budapest. The large number of Jews, some
200,000 in Budapest presented special problems. The first train went
through Kassa, now Kosice, Slovakia, on its way to Auschwitz on May
15, eight weeks after the German occupation, the 138th
train, with the 400,426th
victim, on July 20. According to German official records, a total of
437,402 Jews had been deported by July 9.
Jews awaiting deportaion
People didn't know the destination of these trains, but
on 28 April the Vrba – Wetzler report, the account of two inmates
who escaped from Auschwitz, reached Hungary. Jews were kept in
ignorance of this report, but it did help to bring pressure on Horthy
to stop the deportation.
The Axis powers were rapidly losing the war, Rome was
liberated on June 4, and the Allied landing in Normandy occurred soon
after, but still, on June 15, the Mayor of Budapest designated 2000
houses for Jews to move to, a preliminary step towards deportation.
On July 6, 1944, Horthy ordered the suspension of all
deportations. Jews were comparatively safe, until the overthrow of
the Horthy government on October 15 by the extreme fascist Arrow
Cross group. After that, deportation resumed immediately. My mother
was marched off to Lichtenwőrth,
a small women's camp near the Austrian border, my father, who was
serving with an unarmed labour unit, was marched to Mauthausen, and
from there to the Gűnzkirchen
subcamp. We, my brother and I, were with our grandparents, in the
Budapest ghetto, at first in the smaller international ghetto, later
in the main ghetto. The ghetto was liberated by Russian troops early
on the morning of January 18. I can still see the Russian soldier in
a white fur cape, leaning on his rifle in the doorway of our
building. We were saved. I remember discussing with my brother which
of our parents would have a better chance of surviving. The addresses
of my aunts in New Zealand and in America were so firmly drummed into
us so that should neither of our parents survive we would be able to
get in touch with them. I can still remember, 68 years later, their
addresses. Miraculously, against great odds, both our parents
survived. My mother returned from camp some time late in April, my
father on the first day of school in September four months after he
was liberated. He had been picked up by an American army jeep,
almost dead with typhus and malnutrition, and was nursed back to life
in an American hospital. From the time we were reunited my father
planned our move to New Zealand, where my uncle Paul Novak, and my
aunt, Claire, Klari, were already established. My grandmother moved
here first, in 1947, to join her daughter, then we arrived on 18
November 1948.
Out of close to 800,000 Hungarian people of Jewish
descent about 190,000 were left alive after the war. Of these only a
very small number described themselves as Jews. Under communism most
would say that they were atheists, including the prominent leaders of
the country, Matyas Rakosi, born Rosenfeld, Erno Gero, born Singer,
and Peter Gabor, head of the secret police. Since the fall of
communism there has been a modest Jewish spiritual revival.
My feelings towards Hungary have been very ambivalent. I
value the Hungarian culture, and in particular, the Hungarian Jewish
culture, I supported the Hungarian football team when Hungarians
could still play football, but I was also aware of the pogroms in
wake of the 1956 uprising, and the current right-wing, neo-nazi
Hungarian politicians who want to reintroduce the registration of all
Jews. By and large, I think of Hungary, the remnant of a once great
kingdom, as a sick and corrupt society, that refused to learn the
lessons of its brutal and tragic past. I also remember the glorious
achievements of Hungarian Jews as well as the dark days of
persecution.
1 King
Béla
IV (1235–1270)
appointed a Jewish man named Henul to
the office of court chamberlain – the Jewish Teka had
filled this office under Andrew II); and Wölfel and
his sons Altmann and Nickel held
the castle at Komárom with
its domains in pawn. Béla also entrusted the Jews with the mint;
and Hebrew coins of this period are still found in Hungary. In 1251
a privilegium was
granted by Béla to his Jewish subjects which was essentially the
same as that granted by Duke Frederick
II the Quarrelsome to
the Austrian Jews
in 1244, but which Béla modified to suit the conditions of Hungary.
This privilegiumremained
in force down to the Battle
of Mohács (1526).
2Moritz
Bloch, who changed his name to the Hungarian “Balagi” translated
the Tanach into Hungarian, Moritz Rosenthal translated the Psalms
and Pirkei Avot. Various communities founded Hungarian
reading-circles. Jews relished the opportunities of secular
learning, and the mastery of the Hungarian language mattered greatly
to them
3His
students at the Pressburg Yeshiva, which he founded, had
a great influence on modern Orthodox Judaism to this day. My son,
Rabbi David, studied at the Pressburg Yeshivah in Jerusalem.
4Both
the chief rabbi of the Neologue community, the majority, and the
chief rabbi of the orthodox community, were members as of right of
the Upper House of the legislature.
There were also Jews for whom both the
Neologue and the Orthodox form of worship unacceptable, and formed
yet a third community known as Status Quo, which ultimately merged
with the Neologue community.
5
Grosz Marton and Lorschy Bernát are both listed
in the Hungarian Jewish Lexicon as tax payers of Gyönk in Tolna
County in 1730, the time when the Gyönk Jewish community was
founded. They were my distant ancestors, whose descendants, Grosz
Salamon, and Lorschy Suzanna, my great-grandparents, married a few
generations later.
6Grosz
(spelt with sz, not the German ß (ss), which suggests that they
came from Moravia, and Lorschy (Ysroel spelt backwards).
7He
was remembered, for his great strength, and his exploit; wrestling a
raging bull to the ground in the market place. Baron Jozsef Eotvos
described this incident in one of his novels, one of the Hungarian
classics. I might as well boast about this modicum of fame.
8My
father's mother moved from Bujak, an isolated little village in
Nograd County in North Hungary to Budapest when she was only
seven. Her father died before she was born in some accident, her
mother ran the family business, the local inn and general store, and
my grandmother was sent to her oldest sister in Budapest, My
mother's mother came from Torokszentmiklos in
the Northern
Great Plain region of
central Hungary
to help in the inn of relatives in Rackeve, on Csepel Island.
9General
Bauer fancied himself as a singer. He had a nice baritone voice and
came to my grandparents'' home where my father accompanied him on
the piano in Schubert songs
