The Jewish Face of Budapest

Fülszöveg

The Dohány Street Synagogue is on every tourist's bucket list when visiting Budapest, but Jewish Budapest is much more than that. It is home to one of Europe's largest Jewish communities, with a rich cultural life that offers a variety of experiences for Jewish and non-Jewish tourists, foreign and domestic, and residents alike.
Jewry is inextricably woven into the history of Budapest, but often people who live here don't even know who to associate a famous building, statue or anecdote with.
This book aims at presenting, in an accessible and attractive way, a perhaps less known face of Budapest's present and past. It is not an exhaustive inventory, but an opportuniaty to dive in, explore and experience the atmosphere of Jewish Budapest.
The portrait depicted here is not an elaborate one. Instead, it is a portrait sketch, whose most important features still reveal the Jewish character of Budapest.
However vague, the evidence from the Roman era is firm in suggesting that Jews had... Tovább

Fülszöveg

The Dohány Street Synagogue is on every tourist's bucket list when visiting Budapest, but Jewish Budapest is much more than that. It is home to one of Europe's largest Jewish communities, with a rich cultural life that offers a variety of experiences for Jewish and non-Jewish tourists, foreign and domestic, and residents alike.
Jewry is inextricably woven into the history of Budapest, but often people who live here don't even know who to associate a famous building, statue or anecdote with.
This book aims at presenting, in an accessible and attractive way, a perhaps less known face of Budapest's present and past. It is not an exhaustive inventory, but an opportuniaty to dive in, explore and experience the atmosphere of Jewish Budapest.
The portrait depicted here is not an elaborate one. Instead, it is a portrait sketch, whose most important features still reveal the Jewish character of Budapest.
However vague, the evidence from the Roman era is firm in suggesting that Jews had lived here as early as the ancient times, A young woman called Séptima Maria had been buried there, who must have been Jewish as the drawing on the tombstone implies. Jews settled in Buda after the Tatar invasion from the 13th century; they were sometimes expelled, sometimes called back by the rulers in the course of the history of the Kingdom of Hungary. The literature on that era is more abundant. There are increasingly detailed records on how Jews lived in this area after the Middle Ages, and how they soon became an integral part of Hungarian society, treated almost an equal basis from the second half of the 19th century up to the Holocaust. The Jews of Óbuda were the first to establish a thriving community, building up their industrial plants, in addition to trading. An increasing number of countries purchased products, for instance, from the world-famous Goldberger textile mill since the 1800s. In the 1848-49 war of independence, tens of thousands of Jews were fighting on the side of Hungarians. As the civic age begins and modern European life takes shape, Hungarian Jews are in full bloom, playing a determinant role in arts, science and entertainment. The first cinemas are also set up by Jews, and the world of films soon meets such Hungarian directors of Jewish origin in Hollywood as George Cukor (My Fair Lady) , Michael Curtiz (born Manó Kertész Kaminer)(Casablanca), and the actor Tony Curtis. Among the scientists are Budapest-born Ede Teller, Leo Szilárd and other Nobel laureates who have shone in the skies of nuclear energy, computer science and mathematics, known only as "Martians". We could list world renowned great people who came from Hungary, but this book primarily focuses on the Jewish personalities whose lifetime achievements have shaped, or at least laid the foundations for, the image of the present-day Budapest.
In addition to commerce and industry, culture and intellectual life offered them opportunities to fulfil their potential. Even during the time of the Jewish laws and the deprivation of rights in World War II, they kept their last workshop in the famous Goldmark Room. The Holocaust put an end to that relatively narrow, fifty to sixty-year period of development, and most of the surviving Jews in Budapest lived a neolog or completely irreligious life after the Shoah, preserving their traditions and the common Jewish-Hungarian culture.
Today we have a Jewish quarter again, where religious life is more modest and entertainment is more prevalent, but you can eat kosher food, dance in the summer, and have fun at the Jewish Cultural Festival or the Cholent Festival. More and more young people are attending these events, and sometimes even synagogues. That also belongs to the new portrait of a Jewish Budapest. You can read about all that in this book. Vissza