Jews of Hungary 

A talk delivered at the Kia Torah series of lectures in Wellington, New Zealand

The story of the Jews of Hungary is my story. It is the story that shaped my life, formed my views of the world, my opinions and prejudices, my love of music, gypsy music, sentimental coffee house music and classical music.

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.

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 halfheartedly 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 garb, 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 18^th 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 These rights accorded to Jews were withdrawn again after the return to clerical absolutism, a reaction to the French Revolution.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.

However, the greatest of Hungarian rabbis, the great halachic authority of the first half of the 19^th 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 

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 a 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 9^th 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 1944when he was murdered, shot on the bank of the Danube by a defrocked Catholic priest⁵,

The Hungarian roots of my family can only be traced back to the 18^th century⁶. 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 18^th 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 ancestors⁷. 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 wholesaler⁸.

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 19^th 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 Mitzvah⁹. 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 great 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 their synagogue was the one our family 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 regiment¹⁰. 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 9^th 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 who lived 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 logistic 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 138^th train, with the 400,426^th 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 18th January. 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 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).

http:/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Jews_in_Hungary#Early_history_.281100.E2.80.931300.9

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.

5András Kun http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andr%C3%A1s_Kun

6 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.

7Grosz (spelt with sz, not the German ß (ss), which suggests that they came from Moravia, and Lorschy (Ysroel spelt backwards).

8He 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.

9My 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.

10General 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