The Old Country Part 1

Today was our first day of actual seminar here in Budapest and I haven't really sorted out my feelings on it.  So here's a mishmash of photos, quotes from the day, quotes from our pre-reading, and other thoughts, and maybe you can get some sense of where my head is at.

The restroom of a Hungarian restaurant called Spinoza had this picture of Herzl and... N-a-r-d-v-i? Nardoi? Nardavi? Damn it I need vowels.  Pretty sure it's Nordau but what is that yud doing there?

We found the actual real Christmas market

"By no means well known even amongst Budapest Jews, the story of Sender Tausk is a fascinating one and worthy of special mention. Sender Tausk was a young Jew from Prague who happened to be visiting Jews in Buda at the time of the collapse of the Turkish rule in the city. Worried at the likelihood of a massacre of Jews given their previous loyalty to the Turks, Sender Tausk searched for ways to protect his fellow Jews. His first point of call was in Vienna to the home of Samuel Oppenheimer, one of the wealthiest and best connected Jews in the Austrian empire, if not the whole of Europe. Oppenheimer was a respected court Jew in Vienna and managed to secure an agreement with the Austrian Commander-in-Chief that captured Jews should be released to safety and not killed. In spite of this guarantee, when Hungarian troops did break through the Turkish defences, they nevertheless massacred seventy-two Jews in the synagogue at 23 Tanscics Mihaly Street. The following morning, Sender Tausk came to the Castle Hill area of Buda, accompanied by officers and soldiers of the victorious armies, desperate to enforce the protection that had been granted in Vienna. Tausk assembled the 274 surviving Jews in the synagogue where only the day before the massacre had taken place and where the burnt remains of corpses remained. He hoisted the Austrian flag for protection and set about leading the pathetic group of survivors to safety in Pressburg (Bratislava). From there they travelled through the Austrian territory looking for funds to ransom the Jews from their captivity, all the time accompanied by Austrian soldiers. Unfortunately, the money could not be found and Tausk himself was imprisoned at one point. Eventually his mother and brother agreed to be imprisoned in his place whilst he travelled to other Jewish communities to raise the necessary ransom money. This took him to Cracow, Metz, Frankfurt, Amsterdam and Cleve, until eventually the money was secured.  Finally, in January 1687, Sender Tausk’s Jews were paid for and released."

-From "BUDAPEST: AN INTRODUCTION" By Jeremy Leigh

A mish-mash of architecture propped up together for a world exhibition

"Since the blessings of freedom are even dearer to a people who had been repressed for the last two thousand years, it is my conviction that precisely this freedom, granted by the constitution of Hungary, will bind the Israelite citizens of our country to the homeland in all circumstances."

-Opening Address of Baron Jozef Eotvos, Minister of Religion and Education, Budapest, December 14^th 1868

Statue of "Anonymous" an important Hungarian historian.

The other day I was on a date in Tel Aviv, and I mentioned I was leaving for Budapest in a few days...
Him: Oh really? I was there last summer. It's such a beautiful city.
Me: Really? Why were you there?
Him: Well, I'm half Hungarian. I'm a Hungarian citizen, actually.
Me: Oh yeah? So you go a lot?
Him: No, it was my first time. My Dad was the Hungarian one and he died when I was very young, but I have citizenship and a passport.
Me: So what made you go?
Him: I don't know, I guess I wanted to see for myself. I went to the village where my Grandmother was, before the war.
Ariane: She hid there?
Him: She had a number on her arm, so I guess she didn't hide very well. She only spoke Hungarian so I never really talked to her, and now she's dead. I guess I'll never really know what happened.

Holy Trinity Column in Buda

Strudel and hot coacoa

"When I see myself as part of an abstract community, I have fit myself into a shared paradigm: How else could I, sitting at home in New York or Jerusalem, feel that my fate is tied to the people in other places who don't speak my language, know my personal story, or play an active role in my daily life? Whether I take it on to ease some private pain or to make a spiritual claim to a collective body - or both - a step has been taken beyond biology and geography. I have decided that my immediate surroundings don't express everything I want to say about who I am, or where I want to go."

-Joshua Ellison, Habitus: Budapest

View of Pest, including the parliament building, from Buda

"The Jews of Budapest have been left to make meaning of their heritage largely on their own, without the benefit of having parents and grandparents steeped in its belief or folkways. It's an orphan's inheritance. And there is a kind of freedom in that."

-Joshua Ellison, Habitus: Budapest

Castle in Buda

"The Jews of Budapest today have a lot more questions than answers about their identity, a lot because of the lost generation. After the war, real self-identifying Jews basically left for Israel or for America, they didn't want to stay around in the place that had deported and killed them. The Jews that stayed mostly wanted to assimilate, didn't care if they were Jews or not. So I grew up not knowing I was Jewish. I didn't know until I visited an uncle in Paris for the summer when I was 19, and I asked him how I could get a job so I could go shopping, and he said to go to this street of shops and tell the clerks I was a Jew from Budapest, and they would help me. And I said '...what?'"
-Agi, our tour guide

Streets of Buda

"In the War my father avoided persecution by posing as a member of the family of some gentile friends. But he was in love with Lily, this dark haired Jewish opera singer who was in the ghetto. So one day he found an Arrow Cross (Hungarian Nazi party, basically) armband in the street, and he put it on. And he walked up to the ghetto and he said 'Heil Hitler, I'm looking for Lily Shwartz, this nasty awful Jewess who offended my family, I want to shoot her into the Danube.' And they brought Lily to him, and he took her away and saved her." - Agi

Saint Stephen, the first Hero of Hungary, who converted huge amounts of pagan natives to Catholicism and won papal approval

"The government has undertaken to contribute to the maintenance of the more than 1,000 abandoned Jewish cemeteries. As prescribed by the law about the collective compensation of the Jewish community, an organization called MAZSÖK (Jewish Heritage of Hungary Public

Endowment) was set up. It receives from the state approximately 0.1 per cent of the wealth which

was formerly owned by Jews without heirs and left behind after the Holocaust."

-From The JPR Report on Jewish Life in Hungary

Streets of Buda

"Just as Hungarian Jewry often imported foreign Jewish ideologies which then appeared here on the Hungarian Jewish scene, antisemites similarly imported foreign antisemitic ideologies. These, too, are all booming. Antisemitism keeps up with the spirit of the age. In this sense, Hungary continues its own traditions: just as its Jews change, adapt and renew themselves, so does hate change, adapt and renew itself. The two walk hand in hand.”

-From The JPR Report on Jewish Life in Hungary

A memorial to Raouel Wallenberg, a Swedish envoy to Hungary who helped many Jews escape the Holocaust by hiding them in buildings technically Swedish territory and issuing protective passports.  He shmoozed with the nazis and spent a great deal of his personal money to bribe them and buy the lives of so many people. He was later captured by the KGB and is presumed to have been executed when he was 34.  

There used to be a statue of him that resembled the gold engraving - a man defeating the snake of nazism. But the statue disappeared under communist rule. 

The front of the new statue.

Wallenberg was not Jewish (Well... apparantly he had 1/16 Jewish blood, but he was gentile enough to be considered a Righteous Among Nations). And it was really moving for me to think about being in your early 30s and putting your own money and your life on the line for people who have nothing to do with you and that you'll never personally know.  One of Agi's uncles was saved by a Wallenberg list.

I was sitting in a cafe reading about these things, and I got a text from Sam saying, "You look beautiful." And looked up and around to see him grinning at me from the other side of the room.  Here we are, two Jews in the Jewish ghetto of Budapest, now smiling and waving.

Katelynn posted this poem today, and it felt really apt to me. 

"If God exists he isn't just butter and good luck—
he isn't just the summer day the red rose,

he's the snake he's the mouse,
he's the hole in the ground,

for which thoroughness, if anything, I would adore him,
if I could adore him."

—Mary Oliver, "The Leaf and The Cloud"