#Hungarian Jews

[girlactionfigure]

[thebrightestwitchofherage]

Finally visited Budapest for the first time!

As an Israeli Jew with Hungarian heritage this was so emotional ! I got to see the houses where my ancestors lived in, and toured the local synagogue .We even got to see local Jewish community’s ceremony commemorating October 7th💕🎗️Such a powerful experience !

Pictured above: me visiting the shoes on the Danube bank now adorned with hostages ribbons and pictures & the ghetto’s border.

***Not pictured: me crying like a baby since some of my distant relative were murdered there

[fionamccall]

Hungarian artists document the holocaust

Before the second world war Hungary had a large population of nearly a million Jews and Jewish Christians, but because Hungary was an ally of Hitler's, they were not sent to death camps until relatively late in the war, when the German's occupied Hungary in 1944. This meant that although more than half died, enough survived to testify to their experiences, giving Hungary a unique archive of eye-witness drawings and paintings of the Holocaust, now on display in an exhibition at the National Gallery in Budapest.

Drawings by Edith Bán Kiss (1905-1966), a Hungarian sculptor and painter

What is remarkable about these drawings is how different each is from another, displaying the very individual eye that the Nazis sought to suppress.

Ink drawings of Auschwitz women's camp by Ágnes Lukács (1920-2016) a Hungarian Jewis painter, graphic artist and secondary school teacher

One of the most striking series of drawings was by a Ernő Barta (1878-1976), a danse macabre modelled on the post-plague imagery of the dance of death, but also, I think, influenced by the work of the seventeenth-century artist Jacque Callot's Les Grandes Misères de la guerre.

I particularly enjoyed the paintings by Géza Vörös (1897-1957), caricatures of his comrades in a labour camp and stood hypnotised as they appeared on a screen, one after another, suffering human beings brought back to life in all their idiosyncrasy.

[yoramkelmer]

פורים אין בודאפעשט

Reading the Megillah (Scroll of Esther) in the lobby of a synagogue in Budapest, Hungary, 1981

[leroibobo]

the portugese synagogue in amsterdam in the netherlands. it was founded in 1675.

while most expelled sephardic jews headed to the maghreb, ottoman territories in the middle east and eastern europe, or european colonies around the world, a minority went elsewhere in western europe, mainly to england or the netherlands. the sephardic community in the latter became the largest and richest in europe during the dutch golden age. despite the netherlands' proximity to germany, they predate the arrival of ashkenazi jews to the country by about three centuries.

[stupidjewishwhiteboy]

Ethnicity is about shared culture, which usually (but not always) involves shared ancestry. Freaking Mormons are apparently considered an ethnicity, so it makes total sense for Jews to be an ethnicity (yes, even if people convert in)

[septembergold]

Theodor Herzl in Ottoman-ruled Palestine in November 1898. David Wolffsohn, Imagno/Getty Images.

[postcard-from-the-past]

Synagogue of Újvidék, modern-day Novi Sad, Serbia

Hungarian vintage postcard

[un-ionizetheradlab]

Edward Teller, nuclear physicist and "father of the H-Bomb," speaks about his colleague, mathematician John von Neumann.

Teller has such a fascinating demeanor and way of speaking.

[the-garbanzo-annex-jr]

"This project started somewhat by chance, like almost everything else in life," Éva Horvát, who came into contact with the community through Miklós Rékai, an ethnographer of the Jews of Mukachevo, says. Rékai had been researching the lives of the remaining Hungarian-identity Jews in Mukachevo for a year when Éva Horvát was offered the opportunity to join the project.

"It was a really big opportunity. I was very interested in this community, whose identity was defined by their origins and traditions, while they were living in socially different living conditions. Their system of traditions was rooted in an identity from a very long time ago, while on the other hand, their lives were defined by the pre-war period, the Holocaust, communism, and the regime change as well," the photographer explains.

She spent three years documenting the life of the Jewish community in Mukachevo, including visiting their religious festivals. "We would spend three or four days with them each time, staying in their homes, living with them," she says.

Horvát regularly visited the last Jewish diaspora in Mukachevo between 1992 and 1995, and the Hungarian Museum of Ethnography held an exhibition of her pictures in 1995. Later, the pictures appeared in various collections in several countries, although not in Mukachevo: the people of Mukachevo came to Hungary to see them.

The photos are now being published as a book for the first time under the title "Fallen Oaks, Scattered Seeds" – we chose a selection of the text and pictures from the publication and spoke with Horvát about how she and Rékai experienced the three-year project. Éva Horvát's photographic material is a memorial to the last Hasidic community in Mukachevo, and provides us with a glimpse into the poverty of socialism and the collapse of Transcarpathia after the fall of communism. At the same time, the photos also give insight into the life of a community traumatized by war, whose members, in their own way, are holding on to what keeps them together – their traditions and their religion.

For a long time, Mukachevo was one of the centers of Hungarian-speaking Jewry, the bastion of Hasidism in Hungary, as the book describes it. It was in the 17th century that some Jews from Galicia and Ukraine came to the area of Mukachevo and founded a new community. They were trying to escape the rule of the Zaporizhzhya Cossack Bohdan Khmelnitsky and the ethnic cleansing that took place under him. The Jewish congregation was officially established in 1741, and the town was given a synagogue.

The community soon began to flourish: as the book describes, the number of Jews in Transcarpathia almost doubled between 1869 and 1910, from 64 903 to 128 791. "In 1778 there were already Jewish craftsmen in the area of Mukachevo. [...] The Jews are taking an interest in the public affairs of the city, and they also take a keen interest in the election of judges. In 1792, the Jews consumed wine at the rate of 9 pints", Imre Csetényi wrote in his 1928 text on the Jews of Mukachevo, in his work describing the presence of Jews in the area in the 18th century.

In 1941, the Hungarian army marched into Mukachevo, and the persecution and harassment of Jews began. As Horvát says, before the war, at least 50 percent of Mukachevo's population was Jewish, and the Holocaust became a huge watershed.

[schwarz-gerat]

They should never have taken duels out of politics. politicians yearn to be allowed to shoot at each other these days you can tell

[bimdraws]

Ver "Holocaust Survivor Tells Me: Israel Is Committing Genocide - w. Stephen Kapos" en YouTube

[tootern2345]

The Davis (nee: Davidavitch) of Yonkers, New York circa 1898

The family: (all I can identify)

Sam Davis (father)

Rosa Mermelstein Davis (mother)

Daisy Abel (oldest sibling)

Gertrude Steiner (second oldest)

Emanuel “Mannie” (middle child)

William (penultimate youngest)

and Philip (youngest)

There’s a 6th child in the photo that I’m not available to identify, it appears to be another girl in the bottom sitting from the second oldest. Gertrude. Sidney and Arthur were born in 1900 and 1905 respectively. Mannie, Phil, “Butch” (Sidney) and Art all worked in animation. With Art being the most known out of all the four brothers who were in the industry

[postcard-from-the-past]

100 years ago:

Szeged, Hungary (by Greggreen73)