Travel Research

I normally try to do at least a bit of research before we travel to an area.  Usually it takes the form of putting together a list of the places I would like us to visit.  (The formal division of labor: Husband takes charge of restaurants, I take charge of everything else.)  This time around, the research is taking me into some different areas.  Hungary and the Czech Republic had thriving Jewish communities prior to WW2. I wanted to research a bit about what happened to them and what the communities had been like before their destruction.

From the book, "Jewish Heritage Travel:  A Guide to Eastern Europe" by Ruth Ellen Gruber, Hungarian history as seen from a Jewish perspective:

Hungary

Jews lived [in Hungary] in ancient Roman times, well before the arrival of the conquering Magyar tribes who came from the east in the ninth century, but more modern Jewish history began here with the immigration of Jews from Bohemia, Moravia, and Germany in the 11th century...The following centuries were marked by pendulum swings from persecution to prosperity, from expulsions to acceptance.  A relatively long period of stability for Hungary's Jews began when Muslim Turkish forces defeated Hapsburg armies in the early 16th century and incorporated most of Hungary into the Ottoman Empire, which had long been a refuge for Jews expeled and persecuted in Western Christian countries. Anti-Jewish terror and and mass expulsions of Jews from cities accompanied the recapture of Hungary by the Hapsburgs in the late 17th century.

Many Jews fled, many others arrived and things improved:

The Edicts of Tolerance issued in the 1780s by the Emperor Joseph II eased many restrictions on where Jews could live and granted them other civil rights. By 1850, Hungary's Jewish population reached 340,000.  Jews played vital roles in Hungarian industry, agriculture, business, and finance, even before achieving full, formal emancipation in 1867.  They were active, too, in culture, the arts, and the professions. Before WW1, 42 percent of Hungarian journalists and 49 percent of Hungarian doctors were Jewish...From mid-century until WW1, the Hapsburg rulers raised 346 Jewish (or formerly Jewish) families to the nobility.

Anti-semitism began to rise again, and many Hungarian Jews changed their names to make them more Hungarian sounding.  Many Jews intermarried and converted to Christianity. 

At the outset of WW2, Budapest allied itself with the Axis powers and was rewarded with parts of Slovakia, Transylvania, Yugoslavia, and sub-Carpathian Ruthnia that had belonged to Hungary before WW1.  More than 800,000 Jews lived in this "Great Hungary" in 1941.  Hungary's ruler, Adm. Miklos Horthy, initially staved off the deportation of Hungary's Jews. But after the Germans occupied the country in March 1944, the full-scale annihilation of Hungarian Jewry began.  Between April and June, aided by what one nazi chief called the "zealouys and full participation" of Hungarian police, the Germans rounded up more than 430,000 Jews in provincial towns and villages and deproted them to Auschwitz.  Meanwhile, tens of thousands of other Hungarian Jews died in forced labor battalions, on ghetto streets, or in mass executions...In all, out of more than 800,000 Jews in Great Hungary before the war, at least 550,000 perished, and most Jewish communities in the provinces were wiped out.

...Estimates of the number of Jews in Hungary today range from 54,000 to 130,000 - or even thousands more, depending on the definition of "Jew."  All but a few thousand live in Budapest, and the vast majority are secular or unaffiliated with Jewish institutions.  Still, as in other postcommunist countries, Hungary has seen a dramatic revival of Jewish communal activities and individual assertion of Jewish identity since the fall of communism.  Budapest today boasts a full infrastructure for Jewish life: synagogues, schools, a Jewish community center, kosher shops, and cultural programs and institutions including a Jewish university incorporating a teacher-training college and rabbinical seminary.

Next:  Prague.