Hadassah Magazine: Budapest

This article of mine was published in Hadassah Magazine in December/January.

 

Ruth Ellen Gruber

From Hadassah magazine, December 2009/January 2010 Vol. 91 No. 3

It is edging toward midnight, and a smoky haze clouds the Sirály café in downtown Budapest’s old Jewish quarter. At wooden tables, young people nurse beers or espressos, while techno-punk music throbs beneath the buzz. A few people sit alone, peering intently at their laptops, taking advantage of the free Wi-Fi service.
It is a typical scene in one of the many crowded, youth-oriented cafés that have cropped up in recent years in this funky, inner-city neighborhood.

But a few things set Sirály apart.
For one, there is a mezuza prominently displayed on its front doorpost. Scattered leaflets advertise a Jewish culture festival, an alternative Jewish theater and a concert by a klezmer-hip-hop-punk band. And upstairs, off a lounge, is an office of Marom Budapest, the youth organization of the Masorti (Conservative) movement.

Hungary has the largest Jewish population of any once-Communist state outside the former Soviet Union, with as many as 90,000 Jews in the capital. Twenty years after the fall of Communism, young Jews in Budapest are staking a claim in their identity in bold new ways that are changing the face of Jewish life in the city. Call it Generation J on the Danube.

The institutions that were the hallmarks of the first decade of the Jewish revival still exist—and in many cases continue to flourish. These include more than a dozen synagogues in the city; three main day schools; the Jewish University; the all-purpose Balint Haz Jewish Community Center, opened in 1994; the Jewish Cultural Association (www.mazsike.hu); and publications such as the independent Szombat monthly.

But a host of other Jewish initiatives, projects and organizations now thrive alongside them.
The range is vast. Its scope reflects a dynamic diversity in a generation that rejects definitions of Jewish identity based on the Holocaust, shtetl nostalgia or conventional religious practice, and increasingly seeks models in the Jewish lifestyles found in New York, Paris or Tel Aviv.

“The Jewish youth scene includes people who come from traditionally self-identified families and people who discovered Judaism after 1989,” said Bob Cohen, a Hungarian-American Jewish musician who has lived in the city since the 1980s and fronts the klezmer band Di Naye Kapelye. “Some spent a few years in Israel, some found that local political anti-Semitism drove them to a Jewish sense of community, some simply think it is cool to have an identity bigger than the one afforded them by the ever narrowing self-definition of ‘Hungarian.’”

Youth-oriented Jewish initiatives run the gamut from small, unaffiliated minyanim that meet in private apartments followed by Friday-night dinners to avant-garde culture festivals. For example, a three-day Bánkitó festival was held at a lake in northern Hungary this past August. It featured jazz, funk, klezmer, hip-hop and fusion concerts by local groups as well as exhibitions, films, lectures and workshops. There are Jewish theaters, such as the Golem Theatre and the Budapest Jewish Theater. And a Moishe House, a combination dorm and community center, opened in the old Jewish quarter in September.

Educational opportunities alone include academic programs at Central European University and Eötvös Loránd University, Torah study groups, Jewish lecture series, student clubs and an annual Limmud gathering that in 2008 drew 300 participants.

“People are still just as much looking for new forms to express their Jewish identity as they were in 1989,” said 33-year-old Bruno Bitter, who runs a Jewish pop cultural blog called Kajmánsziget (http://kajmansziget.tumblr.com). As elsewhere, the Internet is another popular forum for Jewish expression and there are a host of Hungarian blogs and Web sites, such as Jewish Meeting Point (www.jmpoint.hu) or the music site Jew Box (http://jewbox.hu).

Sirály, the Bar Ladino café, also located in the old Jewish quarter, and several other new clubs and eateries have become popular meeting points where young Jews can hang out with peers. Open to all, “they are not Jewish places per se, but I would call them Jewish-friendly,” said 29-year-old Adam Schonberger, who helps run Sirály; he also plays in a klezmer-fusion-hip-hop-punk band called Hagesher (www.myspace.com/hagesher). “[The clubs are] a very good and very healthy environment for Jews to live their Judaism, to be happy they are Jews.”

Unlike the sometimes kitschy Jewish cafés that cater to tourists in Krakow and other East-Central European cities where few Jews live, there is nothing nostalgic about these venues—and often nothing overtly Jewish. The décor of the Szoda café, which is owned by two Budapest-born Jews who lived in Israel for a time, features manga cartoon designs, 1960s retro furniture, an orange color scheme and a basement dance floor.

A number of venues offer Jewish programming. Sirály, for example, is a cross between a pub and cultural center. Managed largely by Marom, it hosts exhibits and other events, including performances in its basement theater (www.siraly.co.hu). The Spinoza coffee house and theater, a few blocks away, also features Jewish-themed events, but mainly targets an older crowd (http://spinozahaz.hu).

Last Hanukka, an eight-day festival at Sirály featured experimental performance groups and music as well as lectures on fried foods and the holiday, a round-table discussion on Jewish identity and a talk on charity by local rabbi Istvan Darvas of the Nagyfuvaros Street synagogue. Café service was halted each evening to chant the blessings and light candles on a menora set up on the bar.

“Having an actual space that reflects a community’s needs helps cement an identity,” said Cohen. Sirály, he quipped, has a winning formula to attract young people: “Jewish punk rock, a bar and hormones.”

In many ways, young Jews in Hungary are trying to answer the same basic questions faced by their parents and older siblings in the years after the Iron Curtain came down: What does “Jewish” mean? How can one be Jewish? What are the prospects for a viable Jewish future?

Thanks to the efforts of organized Jewry and the first generation of outreach programs supported by the Joint Distribution Committee, Chabad, the Ronald S. Lauder Foundation, the Jewish Agency and others, there have been myriad ways to experiment over the years.
 
“When I was growing up, exploring Jewishness was [part of] a cool new identity,” said 31-year-old Anna Haraszti, a math teacher. Her parents are Jewish, but she grew up with little knowledge of Judaism and only began taking interest in it in her teens.

“Western [Jewish] culture was so attractive,” she said. “There was free stuff, gifts, camps—a group identity, something that our parents just didn’t get. It was a way to rebel….”
Haraszti tried synagogues, a Jewish summer camp and various other organizations. She also tried Chabad, which has had an active presence in the city since the late 1980s, “because,” she explained, “they were willing to teach without asking for enthusiasm and without giving you the depressing ‘We live to remember the Holocaust’ angle.”

Today, she finds her comfort zone by frequenting Sirály and other informal spaces where young Jews gather simply to connect.

Others, however, have embraced religious practice. Some have formed their own congregations or meet with friends in informal prayer and study groups. Many are drawn to two or three established synagogues with sympathetic young rabbis.

“It is not hard to be Jewish in Budapest,” said Adam, a 21-year-old university student who prefers not to disclose his full name. “There are a lot of possibilities here.”

Born little more than a year before the Iron Curtain came down, Adam attended Talmud Torah classes and celebrated his bar mitzva. Like hundreds of other Jewish children, he also spent part of each summer at the JDC/Lauder Foundation Jewish summer camp at Szarvas in southern Hungary, a flagship outreach program that opened in 1990 and is still going strong. It hosts some 2,000 children and teens each summer, about half from Hungary and half from other countries.

Years later, Adam was so moved by a cantor’s singing at his grandfather’s funeral that he decided to become a cantor himself. He now studies Torah with Darvas and is enrolled at the rabbinical seminary that forms part of the community-run Jewish University. There are half a dozen students in his class, he said, two of them taking the cantorial course.

Adam, who attends the Nagyfuvaros synagogue, located in a working-class downtown neighborhood, plans to stay in Budapest and help foster religious education and practice. “It’s important to support Jewish life here,” he said.

Still, many young Jews chafe under the templates for observance and identity laid down by the Jewish establishment and are turned off by communal politics or personalities.
Bitter ran an iconoclastic blog, www. judapest.org, for four years. “I founded Judapest as a form of escapism from Hungarian Jewish life,” he said. “I was inspired by other places and wanted to share the joy of those other realities and experiences.”

Judapest’s antiestablishment attitude toward what it dubbed the “worn-out” Hungarian Jewish mainstream gained it a loyal following, with as many as 3,000 hits a day.

It described itself as “a grass-roots online and offline community” aimed at uncovering “the relevant, the stimulating and the cool in the Hungarian Jewish Experience.” In addition to the blog, it sponsored brunches and other events and published a successful Jewish cookbook, Fuszer es Lelek (Spice and Soul) by Eszter Bodrogi, that combined kashrut with haute cuisine.

Bitter’s decision to shut down Judapest in January 2009 to concentrate on his family and career as a market researcher initially left many followers bereft. But a few months after closing Judapest, Bitter started Kajmánsziget, which he called a “microblog” aimed at posting “fun links, light stories, goofy Jewish videos.” It is not a continuation of Judapest, he said, whose content was heavy on opinion pieces, debates and social and cultural commentary.

“There are many dozens of people claiming that Judapest had changed their lives…,” he said not long after he closed the blog. “I meet people all the time in their thirties who say that this was their first viable, attractive contact with Judaism. People don’t find answers in aliya and do not find answers in Chabad. There are many new organizations, but people are still looking for answers.”
Whether the plethora of nontraditional choices now on the Budapest Jewish menu can provide those answers remains to be seen.

“A lot of people don’t know what is Jewish. They are not interested in learning; they are only interested in self-expression,” said lawyer Agnes Peresztegi, an observant Jew who eight years ago helped organize the Pesti Shul, an independent modern Orthodox congregation.
The past two decades have seen a bewildering host of Jewish initiatives come and go, becoming popular and then fizzling out when resources dried up or leaders lost interest or, as with Bitter and Judapest, simply moved on. New organizations, individuals and initiatives then emerge to fill the gaps, in a process of continuing turnover.

In addition, noted Kata Zsofia Vincze, who has studied both Jewish outreach movements and the contemporary Jewish scene in Hungary, “it is difficult to find permanent support. Most sponsors help project by project, and they expect these institutions to one day become self-maintaining.
“But they will never become self-maintaining,” she added, “because, in Hungary, there is almost no [concept of] supporting my community, in donating time, energy and money for the community.... This has to do with the lack of secure, permanent financial support, but also with constant inner conflicts and jealousies.”

“There are a lot of organizations that deal with entertainment,” said veteran community activist Mircea Cernov. “This and the provision of services for free or at a cheap price answers some needs. At the same time, this has nothing to do with learning, community research and development, the development of young leadership or capacity building for a sustainable community.”

Cernov works with several new outreach and education groups that have joined traditional players like the JDC in supporting new youth initiatives and fostering a deeper sense of identity. These include the Beit Israel Israeli Cultural Institute, Limmud Hungary and Haver Foundation, which promotes interreligious dialogue and teaches both Jews and non-Jews about Jewish culture, heritage, history and religion.
This year, Haver and three other organizations in Budapest—Marom, Jewish Meeting Point and the Jewish studies program at Central European University—were chosen for inclusion in Compass, a new guide on the model of the American Slingshot guide, that singles out 36 of what it calls “Europe’s most vital, innovative, effective and sustainable Jewish organizations and programs.”

Edward Serotta, who directs Centropa (www.centropa.org), a Vienna-based education and research center on Jewish life in central Europe, is optimistic about the future, if only because the sheer number of Jews in Budapest provides a viable critical mass. He sees the ebb and flow of organizations and activities as part of an ongoing process. “In the 21 years I have been involved with this community, I have seen Jewish organizations...rise and fall,” he said. “What makes Budapest so different is that there are so many of them. Two very successful Jewish schools see more than 1,000 Jewish children daily, there’s a plethora of youth-oriented organizations....

“Just as important,” he added, “there are synagogues where, on any given Friday evening, there are upwards of 100 people and the number of congregants under the age of 7 is far greater than those over 70.

“Even if the core of all those who actually attend these schools and events numbers between 5,000 to 10,000,” he said, “that still makes Budapest as active a community as any of its counterparts in the West.”

Back at Sirály, 30-year-old Robert Vajda sips a drink and surveys the busy scene. Bearded and wearing an embroidered kippa, Vajda embodies both the brashness and the complexity of the new era of Jewish choices in the city. He is the director of the Budapest Jewish Theater, a low-budget troupe whose productions often deliberately provoke: Last year, hooded protestors broke up the performance of a pornographic parody of Hungarian high culture.

Vajda is an alumnus of one of the city’s Jewish day schools and attends services at Nagyfuvaros synagogue. It was he who chanted the blessing and lit the candles in Sirály’s bar-top menora at Hanukka.

“Who is a Jew? I am,” he said, smiling. “What is being a Jew? It is what I do.”

Letter from Europe in Hadassah Magazine

Here is a link to my Letter from Europe about the European Day of Jewish Culture, in the current issue of Hadassah Magazine. (The picture above shows the ceremony in Ancona in 2005).

Read the Full Story at the Hadassah web site -- click on the current issue of the magazine, then scroll down.


Letter from Europe:
A Jewish Holiday for Everyone
By Ruth Ellen Gruber

Under the blaze of a hot noonday sun, a Hebrew prayer floated over a crowd of about 200 people gathered near the summit of a rocky cliff high above the Adriatic Sea at the ancient Italian port city of Ancona.

Spread around them were the remains of the city’s centuries-old Jewish cemetery, notable for its squat white tombstones shaped like truncated pillars, some fallen, some tilted over, some standing erect, their beautifully carved Hebrew inscriptions glinting in the sun.

Ancona’s mayor spoke a few words, and the chief rabbi emeritus of Milan, Giuseppe Laras, offered a benediction. Then the Libyan-born Jewish singer Miri am Megh nagi lifted her voice in a haunting Sefardic song.

The ceremony, in September 2005, marked the rededication of the cemetery after a massive restoration project that had stabilized the land, cleared it of brush and enabled it to be opened to the public. That event formed a centerpiece in Italy’s annual observance of the European Day of Jewish Culture, a continent-wide celebration of Jewish tradition that takes place each year on the first Sunday in September—this year on September 7.

Each culture day has a central theme. in 2005, it was cuisine, and after leaving the cem etery, dozens of people sampled specialties from the varied cultural components that make up Italian Jewry—Sefardic and Ashkenazic Jews, post-World War II immigrants from North Africa and the Middle East, and Italian Jews whose traditions date back to ancient Roman times. On the menu were baked anchovies with endive, fried eggplant in tomato sauce, fish balls made from salted cod and sweet fritters in honey sauce, all washed down with kosher Ital ian wine.

Now in its ninth year, the European Day of Jewish Culture is by far the most ambitious of a dizzying array of Jewish festivals that annually take place all over Europe.

Begun as a local initiative in the Alsace region of France, Culture Day went international in 1999 and is one of the only such manifestations with a cross-border character. This year the theme is music, and the roster encompasses as many as 800 separate, simultaneous events in 30 countries, from Norway and the United Kingdom to Spain and Italy.

With so much going on in so many places, Cul ture Day is targeted more at locals than tourists. Its aim is to enable the public at large to discover the historical heritage of Judaism and, in doing so, to combat anti-Jewish prejudice.

“Making physical access to places of Jewish interest easy is one way of showing the non-Jewish world that they live side by side with people who are ap proach able, accessible and want their culture to be understood,” said Jonathan Joseph, the London-based president of the European Council of Jewish Com munities. “We want our places of worship admired, just like other religions; we want our history to be understood; we want our relevance to the local cultural scene to be clear.”

Each year, synagogues, cemeteries, ritual baths, Jewish museums and other Jewish sites open to the public, and sem inars, exhibits, lectures, book fairs, art in stallations, concerts, performances, guided tours and more take place, many in localities where Jews no longer have a presence. Organizers estimate that last year’s events attracted as many as 200,000 people across Europe, most not Jewish.

In Norway, this year’s celebrations coincide with the opening of the Oslo Jewish Museum. Kicking off the four-day programming on September 6 will be “A Night of Klezmer Music,” with Scandinavian acts including Urban Tun nélls Klezmerband, Sabbath Hela Veckan and Channe Nuss baum & Klez merfobia.

Great Britain’s schedule encompasses three weeks of events, from open houses at dozens of synagogues throughout the country to walking tours of Jewish neighborhoods to concerts ranging from “Jewish Musicians from the East End” of London to the Liverpool Philharmonic performing George Gersh win’s “Rhapsody in Blue.”
Culture Day is loosely coordinated by the ECJC, B’nai B’rith Europe and the Red de Juderias de España, a Jewish tourism route linking 15 Spanish cities. On the ground, however, the operation is staffed by volunteers in each country—Jewish and non-Jewish alike. The level of participation in each country is determined by local interest, resources and capabilities.

Italy is one of the most enthusiastic participants. Last year, events in more than 55 towns and cities at tracted 50,000 people—about 15,000 more than the country’s entire Jewish population. This year, even more venues have been added.

“There is a very high level of interest here, more so than in many other countries,” said Sira Fatucci, national coordinator for Culture Day in Italy. This is partly due to Italy’s effective organization and successful pub licizing. Jew ish communities work closely with public and private institutions, and the event receives government support.

“And then, of course,” she added, “the Jewish patrimo ny in Italy encompasses a uniquely rich and varied ar ray of treasures, like nowhere else.”

These range from Roman-era sites such as the Jew ish catacombs in Rome and the synagogue ruins at Ostia An tica to the med ieval mikve in Siracusa to opulent Baroque synagogues in the Piedmont region to the historic ghetto and centuries-old cemetery in Venice.

But in other countries, the story is different. Given funding and logistics problems, only a few token Culture Day events take place elsewhere, while in some areas, the one-day-a-year mo d el has been outpaced by other local initiatives.

“You can’t offer the same things every year,” said Maros Borsky, who heads a Jewish research center in Bratislava, the Slovak capital. “Fewer people are coming, and some museums, for ex­ample, are reluctant to get involved—they don’t want to open without charging an entrance fee. In a lot of places, people are organizing local days of Jewish culture and other events on their own.”

The norwegian jewish singer Bente Kahan said her own per­formance schedule is so extensive that Cul ture Day has little special relevance. Based in Wroclaw, Poland, Kahan heads a foundation there to re store the city’s historic synagogue and teach residents about Jewish heritage and tradition as well as the Holo­caust.

“My way of teaching is through music and performance,” Kahan said. “We will probably have a concert on the European Day of Jewish Culture, but in fact we do things all the time... school performances in the fall, films in the summer, concerts.”

Teaching a non-Jewish public about Jewish heritage is a way to instill a con nection to emerging issues of identity and history. “We are living in symbiosis,” she said.

Against this background, Culture Day coordinators are refocusing their priorities. They are concerned that the novelty of the day may be waning, with Jewish culture becoming just one of numerous heritages competing for attention—and funding.

“None of us could have predicted that the program would spread so far,” said Assumpcio Hosta, secretary general of the Red de Juderias. “Can it keep expanding? I don’t think so.”

“In general, I wish the day of ‘Jewish culture’ would instead focus on ‘Jewish life,’” said Italian musicologist Francesco Spagnolo, who is scheduled to give talks on this year’s theme in Florence, Padua and Livor no.

“I hope that by focusing on music this time, the European Day of Jew ish Culture will contribute to painting a clearer picture of cultural ex changes between Jews and non-Jews,” said Spagnolo, who currently heads research at the Judah L. Magnes Museum in Berkeley, California. “Hopefully, this will go beyond the usual stereotypes: celebrating the culture of ‘dead Jews’ versus being hostile to actual Jews, includ ing Israel and the Israelis.”

Samuel D. Gruber—Syracuse, New York-based president of the Inter na tional Survey of Jewish Mon u ments—agrees that Culture Day in its present form may have run its course. But, he said, over the years it has served an important purpose and be come a stimulus for related endeavors.

“People use Culture Day to reassess the local angle and the grass-roots potential,” he said. “Jewish heritage is becoming part of the local con stel la tion of monuments to visit—not be cause they are Jewish, but be cause they are part of the local heritage. Americans tend to know Prague, Krakow, Budapest, but there’s a wealth of other fascinating Jewish places out there.”

(Gruber, who is the author’s brother, posts updates on synagogue resto rations, cemetery clean-ups, mu seum openings and Jew ish cul tural events on his organization’s Web site.)

In 2006, as part of their attempt to revamp Culture Day’s focus, or­gan iz ers created the Eu ropean As sociation for the Preser va tion and Promotion of Jewish Culture and Heritage.

Its stated aim is to break out of the one-day-only model and use the ex perience of the past nine years to expand into more deeply grounded proj ects that could maintain momentum and have a year-round impact.

These include an ambitious, transborder European Route of Jewish Her i tage aimed at forming Jewish itineraries that will link the countries that to date have participated in the Euro pean Day of Jewish Culture. This project, however, has yet to gain much trac­tion, despite being recognized in 2005 by the Council of Europe as a Major Cultural Route.

“What we are trying to do is to co ordinate activities of the individual countries involved,” said Hosta. “The AEJP wants to offer a platform to en courage contacts among them, promote the national routes, publicize their experiences and enable the various people involved to learn from one another.”

In fact, several regional Jewish her itage routes already exist, at least as concepts or suggested itineraries.

The most notable—and successful—is the Red de Juderias in Spain, with recommended stops in Avila, Barcelona, Tudela and 12 additional towns. Others include a Hasidic route that will encompass more than a score of towns in southeastern Poland, including Chelm, Jaroslaw and Lesko, currently being formulated by the Warsaw-based Foundation for the Preservation of Polish Jewish Heritage.

In Bratislava, Borsky says that a European Route of Jewish Heritage has potential. City officials, he believes, would be more willing to support an endeavor open to tourists year round than a one-day festival for locals.

Meanwhile, Borsky is working lo cally to create a Slovak Jewish Her i tage Route. To date, it includes synagogues in Bratislava and six other towns, along with several branches of the state-run Jewish Museum and the unique, subterranean burial complex in Bratislava where the influential 19th- century sage Rabbi Moshe Schreiber, known as the Chatam Sofer, is buried.

Borsky has placed plaques at these sites; he has printed illustrated brochures and is promoting them on his Web site, which also includes an expanding database of Jewish heritage. He is also preparing educational programs for schools.

As an architectural historian and active member of the city’s tiny Jewish community, he feels it a “moral duty” to protect and promote Jewish heritage in his country.

“Synagogues are part of townscapes,” he said. “If they are restored, they will add to the quality of life for local residents.

“Jewish heritage,” Borsky continued, “is not something we are keeping just for ourselves now; we save it for fu ture generations who might much more appreciate both these buildings and the complexity of these towns.”

Ruth Ellen Gruber is an American writer living in Europe. Her books include Jewish Heritage Travel: A Guide to Eastern Europe (National Geographic).

Web Resources
- Bente Kahan Foundation: www.fbk.org.pl
- European Day of Jewish Culture: www.jewisheritage.org
- Foundation for the Preservation of Polish Jewish Heritage: www.fodz.pl
- International Survey of Jewish Monuments: www.isjm.org
- Jewish Heritage in Europe: www.jewish-heritage-europe.eu
- Oslo Jewish Museum: www.jodiskmuseumoslo.com
- Red de Juderias de España: www.redjuderias.org
- Slovak Jewish Heritage: www.slovak-jewish-heritage.org