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Neolog synagogue in Győr – Photo by Nataliya Borys |
Thanks to the Jewish Studies Program and the guidance of Professor Carsten Wilke, CEU students (as well as students from ELTE University) had the chance to participate in a beautiful trip to discover the Jewish heritage of this region. We visited seven places in three countries in less than forty-eight hours. Starting off in Hungary, we traveled first to Győr, the industrial center of Western Hungary; that turned out to have a significant Jewish history as well, as we learned from our enthusiastic local guide. The neolog synagogue, restored in 2006, now serves as an impressive site for concerts and graduation ceremonies, as is typical of synagogues outside Budapest, where Jewish communities are too small to maintain such huge 19th century buildings for religious purposes. The Jewish cemetery of the city has a very special funeral home with paintings depicting humans, something uncommon in Jewish art. Traveling to nearby Sopron was a journey in time as well, since this city has two medieval synagogues and a ritual bath as well, whereas in most Hungarian towns one can find traces of Jewish presence going back only to the 18th-19th century.
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Gothic synagogue in Sopron
Photo by Nataliya Borys |
We visited the small village of Balf as well, famous for being the place of a forced labor camp during WWII where eight thousand forced laborers died in a brutal forced march and several well-known Hungarian writers were executed. The location of their memorial, right under a Catholic church and cemetery at the top of a hill, struck me as giving food for thought. The composition of our tour, in which the first day was dominated by experiences on the destruction of the Holocaust and visits to memorials, was contrasted with a second day dominated by the memories of earlier periods in which we visited places of former Jewish life. This structuring was most likely accidental, but nevertheless a favorable turning-point. By the end of the first day I felt that overwhelming depression which I always inevitably come to feel when visiting Jewish cultural sites of the Hungarian countryside; where it is hard to arrive at any other conclusion other than that Jewish local history belongs to the past and was once and for all destroyed by the Holocaust. However, during the second day we have seen a lot of places which provided me with a feeling of reconciliation. Even though we visited four cemeteries in this day, they preserved memories of earlier periods when Jewish communities could live for centuries in the same place, thus one can think of people dying at an old age after a peaceful life, when reading the gravestones. |
Balf Memorial – Photo by Agnes Kelemen |
We have seen two villages – Lackenbach and Kobersdorf – and a town – Eisenstadt – out of the former “Seven Communities” of Burgenland. The name “Seven Communities” refers to a network of Jewish settlements in the lands of the Esterházy noble family. Jews leaving various (Hungarian and Austrian) cities as a result of having been expelled throughout the early modern age found the possibility to settle in Burgenland. I truly believe the Jewish cemetery of Kobersdorf is the most beautiful cemetery I have ever been to, due to its location on a sylvan hill-side. It was very interesting for me to discover Eisenstadt as a place of Jewish history, since I had been there twice already, previously to this trip, and yet I did not know about the Austrian Jewish Museum located there. This town is known for Hungarians basically for its Esterházy-castle. Now, the Austrian Jewish Museum preserves immensely interesting pieces, such as a photo of Jews celebrating Purim in 1946 in a camp for displaced persons and one of them is dressed up as Hitler.  |
Jewish cemetery in Kobersdorf – Photo by Agnes Kelemen |
Our last station was Bratislava, where we visited the Chatam Sofer’s grave and memorial, which is one of the most important Jewish pilgrimage sights of Central Europe. The name Chatam Sofer refers to Rabbi Moses Schreiber (1762-1839), after his book’s title meaning “the seal of the scribe”. As his major work’s title suggests, he was a vehement opponent of Reform Judaism, thus he opposed changes in religious regulations. However, he was not simply a defender of traditionalism, but an innovative ideologue of Orthodox Judaism, founder of the Pressburger yeshiva, the academy of hundreds of Orthodox rabbis, still functioning thanks to its relocation to Jerusalem by the Chatam Sofer’s great-grandson. |
The Chatam Sofer Memorial in Bratislava – Photo by Nataliya Borys |
Agnes Kelemen,
Nationalism Studies,
Hungary
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