(JTA) — In 1944, Andras Szasz’s mother obtained an admittance slip to a Red Cross children’s home that she hoped would save her 8-year-old son from the Hungarian fascists then prowling Budapest in search of Jews to torture or kill. Szasz never made it to the home. In the summer of 1944, he and his…
This month marks the 70th anniversary of the German occupation of Budapest, which began on March 19, 1944. In 2006, my husband and I went to Budapest to see as much as possible that related to Jewish life during that horrendous time. Sixty-two years had passed since my second cousins, Eva and Alice Eismann, had…
The Herzl Center, an educational center designed to introduce Hungarian Jews to the Zionist movement, was inaugurated in Theodor Herzl’s birthplace, Budapest. The center was dedicated Sunday night at the city’s Israel Cultural Center. It was established by the World Zionist Organization and The Jewish Agency for Israel, with the assistance of the Herzl Center…
Andras Daranyi reached across the table in one of the trendy cafes in Budapest’s old downtown Jewish district and fondly patted an unusual-looking object about the size of a bowling ball. Made of dark-gray concrete, the object had eight sides, each an equilateral triangle. Each triangle was perforated by an arrangement of between two and…
A disused train station in Budapest will soon become a $22 million Holocaust memorial center. Janos Lazar, the Hungarian prime minister’s chief of staff, said the memorial will feature an educational center and will be opened by spring next year at Budapest’s Jozsefvaros train station, the Hungarian news agency MTI reported Thursday. That timing coincides…
In a nondescript apartment building in Budapest’s Eighth District, Rabbi Sholom Hurwitz stands behind a wooden podium and claps out the beat to a raucous Sephardic melody. About 30 people, most of them men, pray together in the flat’s main sanctuary, a small living room that the congregants affectionately call their shtibl — from the…
Amid fresh warnings of anti-Semitism in Hungary, some 100,000 Jews from across Europe are expected to attend Budapest’s largest-ever Jewish Summer Festival. The week-long cultural festival, which opened Saturday, is being hosted for the 16th year running by the Federation of Hungarian Jewish Communities, or MAZSIHISZ, and co-organized by the Israeli Jewish Congress. “Part of…
How do you make the world’s tallest kosher sandwich? The Jewish community in Budapest decided it was high time to find out. When Andras Borgula started planning the Budapest’s sixth annual Judafest, a cultural street fair celebrating Jewish life in Hungary held June 9, he had an ambitious thought: Why not set some kind of…
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