From Hungarian to Jew: Debates Concerning the Future of the Jewry of Transylvania in the 1920s. In: Pál Hatos – Attila Novák (ed.): Between Minority and Majority. Hungarian and Jewish/Israeli ethnical and cultural experiences in recent centuries. Balassi Institute, Budapest, 2013 (original) (raw)
Related papers
Holocaust. Studii şi cercetări. vol. X, no. 11, 2018, 2018
After the Holocaust there was a desire for reconciliation by the leaders of the Hungarian and the Jewish minorities in Transylvania. In my paper I will examine the collaboration between the two main organizations and their attitude toward each other. Furthermore, I will show why the reconciliation did not work out well, although both organizations were determined for a successful outcome. My main questions are: Why the reconciliation was so important for the two minority’s elites and to what extent was it successful? And the second most important question: why the attempt happened to be failed although both political groups wished for success? I will argue that the two elites originally wanted the reconciliation to make peace between the two minorities for a number of pragmatic reasons and to satisfy the Communist Party request which stated that the ethnic groups in Romania must live peacefully along with each other in the framework of socialism. The reconciliation attempt had an unsuccessful result because they were not able to overcome those issues that they wanted to resolve.
Conversations on the Jewish Question’ is a series of three interviews, which were published in the Hungarian-Jewish periodical Múlt és Jövö in the years 1925–26. The interviews, which were only published in Hungarian, were conducted with Lajos Biró, Tamás Kóbor and Bernát Alexander, three leading Hungarian-Jewish intellectuals of the period. Aladár Komlós, who initiated the three conversations, was not a neutral interviewer. His own attitudes are clearly expressed in the dialogues as well as in the introductory paragraphs. The conversations, whose historical and biographical background are presented in the introduction, vividly raise key problems relating to post-emancipation European Jewry in the interwar period.
THE POLITICS OF A RELIGIOUS ENCLAVE: ORTHODOX JEWS IN INTERWAR TRANSYLVANIA, ROMANIA
Modern Judaism, 2017
History in general and the study of religious fundamentalism in particular, as well as the ongoing conflicts between various Muslim groups in the Middle East, teach us not only the importance of religious identity but also about the lengths that those who seek to hold on to a specific identity are prepared to go. This article addresses one minor manifestation of this vast phenomenon. From the mid-19th century onward, Hungarian Jews began to acquire a unique religious and social identity that set them apart from other European Jews. Its single most distinctive feature was the formal separation between Orthodox and Non-Orthodox Jews, almost as if they belonged to two different “Jewish churches.” For the first and only time in Jewish history, the Orthodox Jews were able to administer their own communities in accordance with halachic laws and were no longer forced to compromise with non-Orthodox Jews. Following WWI, Transylvania, a former Hungarian district, was annexed to Romania. Consequently, its Jews were cut off from their Hungarian homeland, which had previously enabled them to establish their own Jewish identity. Reluctant to lose their distinct characteristics, they sought and received governmental permission to establish communities and institutions in accordance with their former lifestyle. This led to the establishment of a religiously and culturally autonomous enclave within which the Jews of Transylvania, many of whom were Orthodox, led their public life differently from all the other Romanian Jews. This article focuses on the development of the separate Orthodox institutions and communities in Transylvania. It surveys the characteristics and inner conflicts of Transylvanian Orthodoxy. It then proceeds to demonstrate how the unique set of circumstances that evolved during the interwar period facilitated the strengthening of Orthodoxy’s radical wing, which I call Extreme Orthodoxy, which sought to establish itself as an enclave within an enclave. This sector’s achievement, however, ended with catastrophic results. The uncompromising leaders of this ultra-conservative, anti-Zionist and separatist camp hampered the efforts of other Orthodox leaders to prepare for the impending Holocaust. This, consequently, led to the almost complete annihilation of North-Transylvanian Orthodox Jewry. Nevertheless, the radical ideas of Transylvania’s Extreme Orthodoxy endured, and after the Holocaust were disseminated throughout the Jewish world by the camp’s best known survivor and its prominent spokesman – Rabbi Yoel Teitelbaum, the Satmar Rebbe.
Aspects from the Life of Romanian and Hungarian Jews during the Years 1945-1953
The Jews of Romania and Hungary who returned home from the Holocaust faced a series of difficulties among which we single out: to resume property of their houses and goods; a poor state of health after the deportation; the vast majority of them were in no shape to make a living. They oscillated between integration in the societies created by the communists, and immigration to Israel whenever the communist regimes from these two countries were more permissive. They were rather victims of the communist regimes, their expectations were not met in the communist states and the ones who managed to get out had lost all their assets, apartments, and jobs when they applied for emigration.