There are four Jewish schools in Budapest. In addition to the Lauder school where we spent each morning, there is an Orthodox school, a Chabad school, and the Scheiber school. On Thursday we had an opportunity to visit Scheiber and to teach a class there.
When we arrived in the afternoon, an administrator filled us in on the history of the school which has gone through several iterations throughout the last century. Scheiber is smaller than Lauder, and it is a public school while Lauder is a private school. I taught a class of twelfth graders who ranged in age from 18-20, much older than my American twelfth graders. Similar to the students at Lauder, the Scheiber students assumed that my CESJDS students are not all Jewish. The norms are so different for Jewish schools in the US versus Jewish schools in Europe!
I taught a lesson on Jewish immigration to America, and the students seemed interested and engaged in the material. In teaching Jewish history, I always emphasize the interconnectedness of the Jewish experience and the narrative arc of global patterns of Jewish migration. My Hungarian students seemed taken with this idea, as they had not much considered the international ethnic, religious, and cultural connections between Jews.
After a visit to the Jewish hospital and a tour of the Pest side of the city, we had dinner with Linda Vero who, along with her husband, leads a synagogue, a Jewish camp, and a Jewish youth group in Budapest. Plus, she is a parent of a Lauder student. We had a wonderfully rich and humorous conversation with her about growing up Jewish in Budapest, her work with Jewish youth, Hungarian Zionism, and Jewish education at Lauder. Linda was warm and welcoming, encouraging our questions and answering quite frankly. The conversation gave us a clear window into the excitement and the challenges of leading an actively Jewish life in Budapest today.
