This history of the Jews in Budapest provides an account of their culture and ritual customs and looks at each of the "Jewish quarters" of the city. It pays special attention to the usage of the Hebrew language and Jewish scholarship and also to the integration of the Jews
A groundbreaking, brilliant urban history of a vibrant Central European metropolis--Budapest--and of its now-forgotten assimilated Jews, who largely created its modernist culture in the decades before World War I.
The Great Jewish Cities of Central and Eastern Europe: A Travel Guide and Resource Book to Prague, Warsaw, Cracow, and Budapest is the most comprehensive guidebook covering all aspects of Jewish history and contemporary life in Prague, Warsaw, Cracow, and Budapest. This remarkable book includes detailed histories of the Jews in these cities, walking tours of Jewish districts past and present, intensive descriptions of Jewish sites, fascinating accounts of local Jewish legend and lore, and practical information for Jewish travelers to the region.
This volume retraces Carl Lutz’s diplomatic wartime rescue efforts in Budapest, Hungary, through the lens of Jewish eyewitness testimonies. Together with his wife, Gertrud Lutz-Fankhauser, the director of the Palestine Office in Budapest, Moshe Krausz, fellow Swiss citizens Harald Feller, Ernst Vonrufs, Peter Zürcher, and the underground Zionist Youth Movement, Carl Lutz led an extensive rescue operation between March 1944 and February 1945. It is estimated that Lutz and his team of rescuers issued more than 50,000 lifesaving letters of protection (Schutzbriefe) and placed persecuted Jews in 76 safe houses—annexes of the Swiss Legation. Based on interviews with Holocaust survivors in Canada, Hungary, Israel, Switzerland, the UK, and the United States, this volume shines a light on the extraordinary scope and scale of Carl Lutz’s humanitarian response.
“Jessica Keener has written a gorgeous, lyrical, and sweeping novel about the tangled web of past and present. Suspenseful, perceptive, fast-paced, and ultimately restorative.” —Susan Henderson, author of Up from the Blue Budapest: gorgeous city of secrets, with ties to a shadowy, bloody past. It is to this enigmatic European capital that a young American couple, Annie and Will, move from Boston with their infant son shortly after the fall of the Communist regime. For Annie, it is an effort to escape the ghosts that haunt her past, and Will wants simply to seize the chance to build a new future for his family. Eight months after their move, their efforts to assimilate are thrown into turmoil when they receive a message from friends in the US asking that they check up on an elderly man, a fiercely independent Jewish American WWII veteran who helped free Hungarian Jews from a Nazi prison camp. They soon learn that the man, Edward Weiss, has come to Hungary to exact revenge on someone he is convinced seduced, married, and then murdered his daughter. Annie, unable to resist anyone’s call for help, recklessly joins in the old man’s plan to track down his former son-in-law and confront him, while Will, pragmatic and cautious by nature, insists they have nothing to do with Weiss and his vendetta. What Annie does not anticipate is that in helping Edward she will become enmeshed in a dark and deadly conflict that will end in tragedy and a stunning loss of innocence. Atmospheric and surprising, Strangers in Budapest is, as bestselling novelist Caroline Leavitt says, a “dazzlingly original tale about home, loss, and the persistence of love.”
The Habsburg Empire was one of the first regions where the academic study of Judaism took institutional shape in the nineteenth century. In Hungary, scholars such as Leopold and Immanuel Löw, David Kaufmann, Ignaz Goldziher, Wilhelm Bacher, and Samuel Krauss had a lasting impact on the Wissenschaft des Judentums (“Science of Judaism”). Their contributions to Biblical, rabbinic and Semitic studies, Jewish history, ethnography and other fields were always part of a trans-national Jewish scholarly network and the academic universe. Yet Hungarian Jewish scholarship assumed a regional tinge, as it emerged at an intersection between unquelled Ashkenazi yeshiva traditions, Jewish modernization movements, and Magyar politics that boosted academic Orientalism in the context of patriotic historiography. For the first time, this volume presents an overview of a century of Hungarian Jewish scholarly achievements, examining their historical context and assessing their ongoing relevance.
Winner of the 2019 National Jewish Book Award in the category of Food Writing & Cookbooks. The author refuses to accept that the world of pre-Shoah Hungarian Jewry and its cuisine should disappear almost without a trace and feels compelled to reconstruct its culinary culture. His book―with a preface by Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett―presents eating habits not as isolated acts, divorced from their social and religious contexts, but as an organic part of a way of life. According to Kirshenblatt-Gimblett: “While cookbooks abound, there is no other study that can compare with this book. It is simply the most comprehensive account of a Jewish food culture to date.” Indeed, no comparable study exists about the Jewish cuisine of any country, or―for that matter―about Hungarian cuisine. It describes the extraordinary diversity that characterized the world of Hungarian Jews, in which what could or could not be eaten was determined not only by absolute rules, but also by dietary traditions of particular religious movements or particular communities. Ten chapters cover the culinary culture and eating habits of Hungarian Jewry up to the 1940s, ranging from kashrut (the system of keeping the kitchen kosher) through the history of cookbooks, the food traditions of weekdays and holidays, the diversity of households, and descriptions of food and hospitality industries to the history of some typical dishes. Although this book is primarily a cultural history and not a cookbook, it includes 83 recipes, as well as nearly 200 fascinating pictures of daily life and documents.
"A journey through the lives of young Eastern European Jews that's not to be missed." - Kirkus Reviews (starred review) How do we come to be who we are spiritually? How does our political and social environment influence our development of self? A young American author immerses herself in modern Jewish Hungary. The twenty-one stories she shares will make you laugh, make you cry, and make you want to be your own best self. Somehow I Am Different provides an opportunity to connect in a world that otherwise begs us to stand alone. This book serves as a reminder that in spite of the factors working against us, we have the power to make a difference. In their own words, Hungarian participants will tell you that "Instead of emphasizing our victimhood, we should really tell another story" (Tamas Buchler) and "Maybe I am not perfect, but I am me. At least I am me." (Devora Hurwitz)."
This book documents the physical aspects of the lives of Hungarian Jews in the late 19th and early 20th centuries: the way they looked, the kind of neighborhoods and apartments they lived in, and the places where they worked. The many historical photographs—there is at least one picture per page—and related text offers a virtual cross section of Hungarian society, a diverse group of the poor, the middle-class, and the wealthy. Regardless of whether they lived integrated within the majority society or in separate communities, whether they were assimilated Jews or Hasidim, they were an important and integral part of the nation. We have surprisingly few detailed accounts of their lifestyles—the world knows more about the circumstances of their deaths than about the way they lived. Much like piecing together an ancient sculpture from tiny shards found in an excavation, Koerner tries to reconstruct the many diverse lifestyles using fragmentary information and surviving photos.