Arrival in Budapest and Discovery of My Mission

I arrived in Budapest with four outstanding educators who are my colleagues at de Toledo High School in West Hills, California, before Shabbat which gave us time to get somewhat acclimated to Budapest. Budapest is a beautiful city with friendly people, beautiful buildings, an open tolerant culture in many ways, and a complicated history. I was here once before some 30 years ago, when Budapest (and Hungary) were under Communist control. Then the atmosphere did not feel friendly, and people did not generally smile. No one looked at another in the eye. This was very different. Everyone now smiled and seemed to enjoy the newer freedoms of the past several decades.

We have come as a delegation to learn about Hungarian Jewry and to spend time at a community Jewish school, the Lauder Javne Iskola. It is a K-12 school. We will visit tomorrow, but today we started our journey.

Our guide, Agi, is extreme warm, affable, funny–and very knowledgeable. Both her parents survived the Shoah [Holocaust] in moving ways, and her life is now dedicated to Jewish culture, advocating for the civic welfare and well-being of our people, and standing up for human rights. She is both an inspiration and a role model.

I will give some highlights of our very packed day, not in chronological order, but perhaps in more thematic order.

We visited the Dohany Street synagogue, also known as the Great Synagogue of Budapest. Built between 1854-1859, it is the second largest in the world (after Temple Emanuel in New York City), but many might agree that this is the most magnificent. It is a conglomeration of many influences, including Moorish, Byzantine, Romantic, and Gothic. On the wall outside the biblical verse is cited which quotes G!d as stating, “Build for Me a house, and I shall dwell in it.” (Exodus 25:8) Seeing this Synagogue, we might feel the Divine Presence. Franz Liszt was the first to play the organ at the synagogue’s dedication in 1859. The edifice is a glorious reminder of the once proud Jewish community here, a time when Jews constituted over 30% of the city’s population. Now, however, the Synagogue does not rarely get filled for services. Indeed, more non-Jewish tourists come here than do Jewish worshipers.

The synagogue is part of a phenomenon called Neolog Judaism, what seems to be a modification of Orthodox Judaism, modified to allow the use of the organ on Friday nights and an all-male choir. These elements were the hallmarks of the changes made by the Reform Movement in the 19th century, and Hungary was one area where Reform Judaism proudly points to important beginnings (along with Germany). The service is otherwise traditional, with a separate seating maintained for men and women. Nonetheless, the majority of those who belong to this synagogue do not usually participate in synagogue life or in Jewish communal life. This is a challenge to which American Jews can surely relate.

Part of today’s Synagogue complex but situated in what was originally an independent building, is the Jewish Museum, built in 1930. It was built, however, on the site of the two-story Classicist home where Theodor Herzl, the father of modern Zionism, was born and raised. Many know Herzl’s career as a reporter for a Viennese newspaper, especially his coverage of the trial of Captain Alfred Dreyfuss in Paris on behalf of the Neue Freie Presse, which changed his approach to “the Jewish question” from assimilation towards territorial nationalism, and then on to Zionism. Many forget that his roots are here. In the Museum is a letter written by Herzl explaining why his dream of a Jewish state is not utopian, but both practical and necessary.

Other highlights of the collection include:

 

• an amazing piece of micrography where the words of the Torah are spelled out in small letters to form a picture of Emperor Franz Josef (1830-1916) of the Hapsburg Empire, whose was beloved by Jews

 

 

 

 

• a poster for a 1913 film on life in Palestine seems to tell of hope and potential for life there

 

 

 

 

 

• An amazing Chanukiah, candle holder for the winter Chanukah holiday, that rotates so that each of its eight sides is used to honor each specific day of the holiday,

 

 

 

 

• A 1711 map of the Israelites’ 40 years of wandering in the desert, as the cartographer understood the data from the biblical text

 

 

 

 

 

• A beautiful, detailed papercut shivitti, a meditational hangingThese and other treasures were spared destruction by the Nazis only because they were hidden in the basement of the National Gallery.

This fact leads me to reflect on what we learned and heard of the Shoah in Hungary.

• A project in Budapest is placing plaques in front of every home from which Jews were grabbed and taken. It is quite moving to see the commitment to memory, and I am startled to notice these. Someone, once, lived here, worked here, loved here. Let us not forget!
• In the Museum is a letter by a desperate man to his wife, thrown out from a train car just before it shut, a train that would travel to Auschwitz. The letter miraculously reached the writer’s wife. It became an important piece of evidence at the trial of Adolf Eichmann, one of the major organizers of the Holocaust (trial April, 1961-June, 1962).
• In the Raoul Wallenberg Garden is a memorial to those Righteous Gentiles who, at great sacrifice to themselves and their families, rescued Jews during the Holocaust. Raoul Wallenberg himself famously used his status as a Swedish diplomat to rescue, directly and indirectly, some 100,000 Jews. He was captured by the Russians, who may have found out that he was working, in part, for the United States. He was sent to a Russian prison and never heard from again. The Russians claimed to have executed him in July, 1947, but many eyewitness reports claim to have seen him at many junctures over the following decades.
• Since he was born into a wealthy Gentile family in a country that was neutral, we might well wonder: Why would he risk everything to save a people who were not his? He probably did not know any very well, and he knew nothing of Jewish culture. Clearly, his sense of virtue and justice compelled him against the generally European cultural climate which either sympathized with the Nazi cause or did not care about Jews. However, my own research has uncovered the presumption that most hold today that Wallenberg was gay. A previous generation may not have wanted to report this, but he certainly was known to have had gay friends and companions, and he accompanied them to gay establishments. It may well be that being part of a persecuted minority, a minority that was persecuted for no good or sane reason, helped him to see clearly that Jews were being persecuted for no good or sane reason. Indeed, anyone who was different was seen as threatening to the Nazi regime. And today we know that any intolerance can grow into a senseless–and ceaseless–hatred, and that prejudice against one group is often accompanied by hatred toward another. Do we, in our own time, have the Wallenbergian courage to stand up for our principle of tzedek, tzedek tirdof (Deuteronomy 16:20)? Would we “pursue, pursue justice”–for all?
• We learned of the Rudolf Kastner case. Kastner was a Jewish Hungarian lawyer who negotiated with the Nazis that spared Jews from the gas chambers, perhaps over 15,000, including some 1,684 on the famous Kastner train that rescued Jews in exchange for gold, diamonds and cash. He moved to Israel after the war and served in the government. However, he was arrested in 1953 for collaborating with the Nazis and placed on trial. He was murdered for his collaboration in 1957; some nine months later Israel’s Supreme Court cleared him. Whatever the merits of the case, we are left we a complicated scenario: When can we talk to or even negotiate with evil in order to save human life? Is this permissible? Is Jewish survival at all costs a good? Or is “selling one’s soul to the devil” (stated by an Israeli lower court judge) forever taint the lives saved? And in saving those lives, is it fair to choose some over others? Isn’t that playing G!d? On the other hand, if no one makes these choices, don’t we doom the innocent to further torment and death? The issues of the actions of some Jews in those difficult times are something that we, from a distance, might well refrain from judging. But such thorny issues will resonate whenever we ourselves go through or reflect on horrific times.
• Deportations of Hungarian Jews began late in the war, in the beginning of May, 1944. By July 7 of that year–only months later–some 437,402 Jews had been deported. By the end of the war over 600,000 Jews were killed. This represents one out of every ten Jews the Nazi regime killed, with help from local populations everywhere, including the Arrow Cross in Hungary. These statistics are approximations–one scholar suggests a pre-war Hungarian population of 800,000 Jews, with only 80,000 surviving.

Yes, we later in the day took in some beautiful views of Budapest and the Danube River. We learned of some of the heroes of Hungary (at the Heroes’ Monument), and saw other sites. But I am left pondering so much of what happened to Hungarian Jewry, what might have been, how we honor the dead, support the living.

Outside the Jewish Museum is a weeping willow memorial. Its leaves represent those taken and murdered in the Holocaust. A tree, of metal, this weeping willow will forever weep. Yet if we could turn it upside down, it seems that this weeping willow will become a chanukiah, the candleholder used during the festive holiday of Chanukah. Those lights require someone to light the shamash, the helper candle, that can help light the wicks of the actual Chanukah lights.

And I am left to consider as I look at this weeping willow: Who will overturn the world’s hatred so that we can also overturn the weeping it causes, and so set the chanukiah–and our lost moral compass–upright, so that we can ignite the hearts of all with love? I am here to commit myself to relighting the spark of Jewish life in Central Europe, particularly Hungary and particularly among the teenagers at the Lauder Javne Iskola so that they, with their pintele yid–their Jewish spark–rekindled, they can begin to refashion Jewish life and Hungarian life. Tomorrow I will go to the Lauder Javne Iskola for the first time so that I can start to live up to my commitment. And I invite you to find ways to join me, in the holy task of rekindling the lights of justice, hope, and peace

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