As the sun sets on our last day in Budapest, I huddle in the frigid air with my Beth Tfiloh colleagues on the east bank of the Danube River as we say goodbye to Shabbat. The moment should be – and is – achingly beautiful; the bridge and centuries old architecture of the buildings surrounding it light up the river like a scene stolen from a fairy tale.
And yet I cannot focus on the beauty of the approaching nightfall or on the spiritual magic of the Havdalah service we share. As in my first night in Budapest, I am, again, standing in front of a Holocaust memorial – this time “Shoes on the Danube Bank”: all manner of bronzed shoes – men’s, women’s and children’s shoes, worker’s worn shoes, ladies’ fashionable shoes, delicate petite shoes – cemented into the concrete surrounding the river bank in the slightly haphazard positions of shoes that one has just stepped out of. Each pair of these shoes stands for the Budapest Jews who were ordered to take off their shoes and then shot into the Danube River by fascist Arrow Cross militiamen on January 8, 1945. Some victims were killed instantly while others drowned as the freezing water carried them away. The shoes demand my attention, reminding me of why I have traveled with this team of Beth Tfiloh teachers to Budapest to connect with the teachers and students at the Scheiber-Sandor School to help them breathe life into the tenuous flame of their Jewish community.
Our visit to the Shoe Memorial ends a Shabbat that began on Friday evening with the young people living at the Moishe House in Budapest, a shared home for Jewish young adults who use their rent subsidy and program budget from the non-profit organization Moishe House International to create their own ideal Jewish communal space. Our Shabbat dinner hosts included a young woman in medical school, another studying veterinary medicine and a young man who just ended what he jokingly termed his “funemployment” to take a technology job. Daniel, another of our young hosts, and I spoke with shared excitement about the new Jonathan Safran Foer novel Here I Am that we are both currently reading, and I promised to send him my list of book titles and discussion questions from the Jewish Book Club I run for Mercaz, Beth Tfiloh’s adult education program, to help him create his own Jewish Book Club. These Moishe House residents, so bright and passionate about their work, so warm and welcoming to our group, so committed to reclaiming their Jewish identity in a place where such an identity once proved fatal, represent the future of the Hungarian Jewish community, the role models for our Scheiber Sandor students, many of whom have named leaving Hungary as the goal for their own future.
Now, as I look at these shoes against the beauty of the Danube, I think of all of the young people I have met during the past week — some brimming with hope and optimism, others with cynical bravado — but all wanting the same things that young people everywhere want: the opportunity to become who they are meant to be, the freedom to explore every aspect of their own identity, the chance to belong to something greater than themselves. I leave Budapest to travel home to my own school in Baltimore recommitted to these ideals, not just for the students in my own community, but to those who I now think of my students at the Scheiber Sandor School.
