The Scheiber Sandor school is closed today and tomorrow, so we dedicated our day to learning about the Budapest Jewish community. After spending three days teaching students, many of whom want to leave their country, today was inspirational.
In the afternoon, we visited the Teleki Ter Shteibel. In this neighborhood of Budapest, there used to be 50 shteibels. But the Holocaust and decades of communism and assimilation have reduced that number to 1—the Teleki Ter Shteibel.
About 10 years ago the building was falling apart and its tiny congregation aging. The neighborhood was about to lose its last shteibel and Jewish life in this once thriving Jewish community disappear. Then two young men, brothers, appeared and fell in love with the shul. They dedicated hours of their energy and resources to the shul. Now it is a small, but young and vibrant shteibel that has a rabbi, and services every Friday night, Shabbos morning and for all the holidays. Next month the rabbi’s twin sons will celebrate their bar mitzvahs there.
One of the brothers, Gabor, is a photographer. Before we left, he showed me a book that they self-published about the history of the Teleki Ter Shteibel and its neighborhood. They could only afford to publish two copies of the book—one in Hungarian and one in English. The book contains archival photographs of the Teleki Ter Shteibel and the neighborhood from throughout the twentieth-century, as well as photographs of the shul that Gabor has taken in the last decade.
The most breathtaking photographs were those that Gabor took when he first committed himself to renovating the shteibel. In the pictures, the shul looks like you would imagine a bombed out building. Several other photographs show the small band of volunteers who labored to rebuild the shteibel and provide a functioning house of worship for the neighborhood. Seeing the before pictures and standing in the after results jumpstarted my faith in humanity. These brothers could have let the shul die. 49 other shteibels in the community had already died. They could have walked away, but they refused to do so.
That evening we had dinner with Linda Vero-Ben, an author of Jewish children’s books and a leader of the Frankel shul community in Budapest, of which her husband is the rabbi. She explained that because girls in Budapest do not have bat mitzvahs, her daughter did not want to have one. So she gathered her daughter and a small group of her friends and they studied together every Sunday for year. Then, during the summer, she took all the girls to Camp Szarvas, and the girls had a group bat mitzvah. Out of that group, a BBYO chapter has developed with 45 girls. Like Gabor and his brother, Linda could have walked away, but she refused to do so.
Located in Hungary, Camp Szarvas is a story itself. Established in 1990, Camp Szarvas is dedicated to giving Jewish children in Central and Eastern Europe the Jewish summer camp experience that the Jewish children in North American take for granted. Since its beginning more than 25,000 children have attended Camp Szarvas. The founders of Camp Szarvas could have walked away, but they refused to do so.
