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Looking Back at the Holocaust, Through a Child’s Eyes
New York Times by Isabel Kershner JERUSALEM — Jakov Goldstein survived the Holocaust as a child by hiding alone for two…
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At the Jewish Museum of Vienna, Enduring Images of Europe
By: Sarah Wildman, The New York Times Erich Lessing is one of the foremost chroniclers of 20th-century Europe, known equally well for photographing politicians like Charles de Gaulle, Eastern…
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Tracing Jewish Heritage Along the Danube
The New York Times By Lisa Schwarzbaum Like many who share my hair texture and fondness for rugelach, I am the descendant of Jewish forebears who boarded boats in the first half of the 20th century to escape bad times for our people in Central and Eastern Europe. These intrepid emigrants took to the water, settled in America and built a Jewish-American culture of creative assimilation. I owe them my life. Like about a third of the 120 or so fellow travelers with whom I spent seven nights on the Danube River last November, I boarded a boat called the AmaPrima in Budapest to float back to some of the same places so many of those same emigrants were — history has confirmed — lucky to leave behind. I was bound on a Jewish heritage tour, combining two growing travel trends: roots and rivers. In my case, the combination was a special-interest option laid over a popular Danube itinerary that AmaWaterways has been offering since the company entered the river-cruise market in 2002. On the water, we were all in the same boat as it powered from the Hungarian capital of Budapest to Bratislava, Slovakia; Vienna, Linz and Salzburg, all in Austria; and, finally, Regensburg and Nuremberg, in Bavaria, Germany. The AmaPrima cruise ship in Bratislava, Slovakia, top, one of the stops on the Jewish heritage tour along the Danube. Credit Akos Stiller for The New York Times. Each day, we shared the same abundant (nonkosher) meals and modest smartphone- and tablet-photography skills. Each night we repaired to our similar small, sweet, meticulously plumped cabins. (Our vessel could hold a maximum of 164 passengers.) And we all relaxed together each cocktail hour — mostly couples, mostly in their 50s to 70s, and mostly North Americans, along with some stray vacationers from England, Ireland, Australia and China — in the same pleasant lounge, with its big picture windows. Together, we admired the luxe bed linens, the Wi-Fi in every room, the bottomless free glasses of wine, the outdoor hot tub, the on-board gift shop, the minuscule hair salon and gym area, the all-inclusive pricing. But when we stepped onto dry land in a different city each day, with local guides and buses synchronized to meet us, each traveler could choose between a Jewish heritage tour or a more standard city tour. (Independent exploration was also an option.) And we who had booked our trips in honor of our roots would, for a few hours, explore paths haunted by ghosts. We would step into cemeteries with tumbled headstones. We would admire the very few synagogues that remain — so beautiful in Budapest, so stately in Vienna! — and listen to tales of the hundreds more destroyed. We would peer at old photographs and study rescued personal objects confiscated from the disappeared and today reverently displayed in glass cases. Each day we walked the streets of a Jewish heritage now effectively devoid of Jews, and we listened as guides described to us what used to be and is no more, along with tempered reports of precarious Jewish life as it exists today. Then, as darkness set in, we returned to the boat to reunite with fellow passengers who had spent the day on the cruise line’s default tour of gentile European culture. The Chatam Sofer Memorial, formerly the Old Jewish Cemetery, in Bratislava.Credit Akos Stiller for The New York Times. For a week, under the friendly efficiency of the cruise manager, Dragan Reljic, we clinked aperitif glasses of Hungarian, Austrian or German liqueur in friendly toasts to historic beauty, both original and rebuilt following war after war, century after century. Then we freshened up for another dinner banquet, warmed by the pleasurable, high-end comforts of our Danube holiday. This is the only way I can begin this story. The weight of your emotional baggage may vary. Budapest is an eminently logical place to start the search. Draped on both sides of the Danube, the city is home, still, to one of the largest Jewish populations in Europe, shrunken as it is. Not insignificantly, the river is also wide enough — and the docking availability commodious enough — to handle the current explosion in river-cruise tourism. Not for nothing has AmaWaterways increased its fleet to 19 vessels in 2015, while the industry leader, Viking River Cruises, will run 60 river ships with 25 itineraries this year. Along with a handful of others who would become my shipmates, I opted for an organized predeparture extension of two nights in Budapest before we embarked. That way, I could visit the imposing Moorish-style Dohany Street Synagogue, the largest active synagogue in Europe today. (It is, for that matter, the second largest in the world, after Temple Emanu-El in New York City.) As substantial as Dohany Street Synagogue is, though, it paled in emotional resonance compared with the effect of Shoes on the Danube Bank, a memorial by the sculptor Gyula Pauer and the filmmaker Can Togay. This simple, quietly heartbreaking permanent installation of 60 pairs of empty shoes, cast in iron on the Pest side of the Danube embankment, is a memorial to thousands of victims of Hungary’s own fascist Arrow Cross, in 1944-45. Men, women and children were relieved of their footwear, lined up and shot dead so that their bodies would fall into the Danube and wash away. Art puts our feet where they once stood. In the Stadttempel synagogue in Vienna, with the bar mitzvah of Nathan Baranow taking place in November. Credit Akos Stiller for The New York Times. Click HERE to read the full article.
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What ISIS Really Wants
The Atlantic By Graeme Wood What is the Islamic State? Where did it come from, and what are its intentions? The simplicity of these questions can be deceiving, and few Western leaders seem to know the answers. In December, The New York Times published confidential comments by Major General Michael K. Nagata, the Special Operations commander for the United States in the Middle East, admitting that he had hardly begun figuring out the Islamic State’s appeal. “We have not defeated the idea,” he said. “We do not even understand the idea.” In the past year, President Obama has referred to the Islamic State, variously, as “not Islamic” and as al-Qaeda’s “jayvee team,” statements that reflected confusion about the group, and may have contributed to significant strategic errors. The group seized Mosul, Iraq, last June, and already rules an area larger than the United Kingdom. Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi has been its leader since May 2010, but until last summer, his most recent known appearance on film was a grainy mug shot from a stay in U.S. captivity at Camp Bucca during the occupation of Iraq. Then, on July 5 of last year, he stepped into the pulpit of the Great Mosque of al-Nuri in Mosul, to deliver a Ramadan sermon as the first caliph in generations—upgrading his resolution from grainy to high-definition, and his position from hunted guerrilla to commander of all Muslims. The inflow of jihadists that followed, from around the world, was unprecedented in its pace and volume, and is continuing. Our ignorance of the Islamic State is in some ways understandable: It is a hermit kingdom; few have gone there and returned. Baghdadi has spoken on camera only once. But his address, and the Islamic State’s countless other propaganda videos and encyclicals, are online, and the caliphate’s supporters have toiled mightily to make their project knowable. We can gather that their state rejects peace as a matter of principle; that it hungers for genocide; that its religious views make it constitutionally incapable of certain types of change, even if that change might ensure its survival; and that it considers itself a harbinger of—and headline player in—the imminent end of the world. The Islamic State, also known as the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS), follows a distinctive variety of Islam whose beliefs about the path to the Day of Judgment matter to its strategy, and can help the West know its enemy and predict its behavior. Its rise to power is less like the triumph of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt (a group whose leaders the Islamic State considers apostates) than like the realization of a dystopian alternate reality in which David Koresh or Jim Jones survived to wield absolute power over not just a few hundred people, but some 8 million. We have misunderstood the nature of the Islamic State in at least two ways. First, we tend to see jihadism as monolithic, and to apply the logic of al‑Qaeda to an organization that has decisively eclipsed it. The Islamic State supporters I spoke with still refer to Osama bin Laden as “Sheikh Osama,” a title of honor. But jihadism has evolved since al-Qaeda’s heyday, from about 1998 to 2003, and many jihadists disdain the group’s priorities and current leadership. Bin Laden viewed his terrorism as a prologue to a caliphate he did not expect to see in his lifetime. His organization was flexible, operating as a geographically diffuse network of autonomous cells. The Islamic State, by contrast, requires territory to remain legitimate, and a top-down structure to rule it. (Its bureaucracy is divided into civil and military arms, and its territory into provinces.) We are misled in a second way, by a well-intentioned but dishonest campaign to deny the Islamic State’s medi religious nature. Peter Bergen, who produced the first interview with bin Laden in 1997, titled his first book Holy War, Inc. in part to acknowledge bin Laden as a creature of the modern secular world. Bin Laden corporatized terror and franchised it out. He requested specific political concessions, such as the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Saudi Arabia. His foot soldiers navigated the modern world confidently. On Mohamed Atta’s last full day of life, he shopped at Walmart and ate dinner at Pizza Hut. Click HERE to continue reading.
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The Last Trial: A Great-Grandmother, Auschwitz, and the Arc of Justice
The New Yorker Elizabeth Kolbert Oskar Gröning, who has become known as “the bookkeeper from Auschwitz,” was born on June 10, 1921, in Nienburg, a town about thirty miles south of…
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70th Anniversary of the Liberation of Auschwitz
On January 27, 2015 we commemorated the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Nazi German concentraction and extermination camp Auschwitz. On this day the whole world was listening to…
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It’s Disrespectful for the Shoah’s Victims If All We Teach is Death
Jewish News Online By Scott Saunders, Founder and Chair of March of the Living UK How do you understand the un-understandable, explain the inexplicable? Seventy years since the liberation of Auschwitz, we continue to grapple with the lessons of the Holocaust and how we should approach Holocaust education for our children. In recent years, the Holocaust Educational Trust, the Institute of Education, the Holocaust Education Centre and others have done a remarkable job in developing methodologies to enable non-Jews to learn about the Holocaust in ways that are relevant and meaningful today. Yet the challenge is no less great when we address our children. How can they be helped to understand the Holocaust within the context of their own identities? How can we address its significance for the Jewish people without making it the defining experience, which it must not be? And as the generation of survivors and first-hand witnesses to the events of the Holocaust pass on, how can we protect the authenticity of education or, more colloquially, “keep it real”? The answer for many Jewish organisations has been to replace people with places, so that over recent years we have seen an upsurge in the number of Holocaust education ‘experience’ trips to Poland and the death camps. Indeed, for many teenagers and young Jewish adults it has become as much a ‘rite of passage’ as Israel tour. But the increased dependence on such trips to teach about the Holocaust has rightly prompted much debate and concern among academics and educators. How do we give the experience meaning without it becoming self-indulgent? How do we make it not morbid, but life-affirming? How do we avoid it becoming agenda-led, even a cynical guilt trip to adopt a particular Jewish lifestyle in place of those many millions murdered? These were the questions we considered last weekend, at a gathering of three dozen of the leading practitioners in the field, at a seminar organised by March of the Living, which – over the past five years – has taken more than a thousand Jewish young adults to Poland. We have made it a mission at March of the Living UK to set the gold standard in Holocaust education for young Jews. So while it is tempting to simplify and manipulate young emotions to provide a narrative that presents Poland as the ‘Jewish graveyard’ and condemns the Poles as “worse than the Germans”, we will not do it. For while of course the death camps were in Poland, they were German death camps, not Polish ones. Similiarly, while many Poles were anti-Semitic, many were not. This is only part of the story. When we hear from Holocaust survivors in person – whatever the context – the experience is generally uplifting, simply because of the very fact of their survival. That they have rebuilt their lives, so often had new families and retained their Jewish identity is – in and of itself – a remarkable act of defiance. Replace their role in Holocaust education with Poland and the camps, and the danger is that we focus purely on death. Yet that need not be the case: the Jews of Poland had been a constant for almost a thousand years; their history was rich and diverse and we show a huge lack of respect to their memory if all we teach is about their death. This is a journey not only into the death camps, but also into Jewish heritage. So our responsibility is to ensure that young Jewish adults today understand not only the production line of death, but the world that was; how else can they begin to appreciate what was lost? By engaging with such narratives, we can give a broader education to the next generation, even without the personal experiences of the survivors. The re-emergence of a Jewish life in Poland today is important and they seek interaction with other Jews across the globe. The fact that too many of the groups that go to Poland insulate themselves from anything outside their bus – fly in and out without engaging with modern Poland and Polish society – is only a partial experience. We must open dialogue with the growing Polish Jewish population today and learn how Poles look at their own narrative. Only by engaging with all these strands can we create a full experience-based educational opportunity in Poland. And only then can young Jews determine their own informed response to the events of 70 years ago, and give meaning to their own, self-determined, Jewish journey.
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President Obama quotes Pinchas Gutter, Holocaust survivor who participated in the March of the Living, at USC Shoah Foundation Dinner
Remarks by the President at USC Shoah Foundation Dinner Hyatt Regency Century Plaza Hotel Los Angeles, California – May 7, 2014 THE PRESIDENT: Thank you so much. (Applause.) Thank you. Thank you…
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Making Amends
Mosaic By Robert Eli Rubinstein A mysterious request leads the Canadian-born son of a Holocaust survivor back to the old country. “There’s someone here to see you.” “Who is it?” “Her name is Magda Zelenka,” replied my receptionist. “She says she has something important to discuss with you, but she doesn’t have an appointment.” It took me a moment to recall Magda. Decades earlier, my late father Bill had hired her and her husband Ferenc as superintendents of an apartment building in the Toronto suburb of Etobicoke. Despite his own shattered life back in Hungary, my father was remarkably free of vindictiveness, hiring Germans, Austrians, Ukrainians, Croats—even Hungarians—as long as they were the best qualified candidates for a job. The Zelenkas proved excellent employees: hard-working, courteous, beloved by tenants. After long years of service, Ferenc suffered a series of heart attacks followed by a fatal stroke. Although Magda hoped to continue managing the building on her own, the challenge had proved overwhelming. She was no youngster, and hardly in the best of health herself. Nor, in spite of her lengthy residence in Canada, had she ever really mastered the English language, which made it difficult for her to communicate. With deep regret, she submitted her resignation, asking only that she be allowed to rent an apartment in one of our buildings. By then, my father had retired and I had come into the business. I agreed to her request without hesitation, assuming she would wish to remain in her old neighborhood among other expatriate Hungarians. To my surprise, she specifically asked for a building with a large number of Jewish residents, in a predominantly Jewish area. And now, years later, here she was. Intrigued, I ushered her into my office and in the seldom-used language of my childhood asked after her health: “Hogy tetszik lenni?” Her eyes lit up as, in her habitually formal style of address, she prepared to answer. “I am not doing very well, sorry to say. I just came home from a long stay at the Jewish hospital”—she meant Mount Sinai, in downtown Toronto—“where I had difficult surgery. I am only here today because the excellent Jewish doctors saved my life. I have always known that your people are not only talented and successful, but also kind-hearted. That is why I am here to see you.” Your people—the compliment made me uncomfortable in a way she surely didn’t intend. I wondered whether I was overreacting. “I don’t really know you, Mr. Rubinstein, but I was privileged to know your late father, and I am sure you take after him. Your dad was a wonderful person, an old-fashioned gentleman. We never had the feeling he was the big boss and we were just his lowly workers. And we also felt a special connection to him because he was a fellow Magyar.” That was jarring. My father had seen himself as a Jew, born in Hungary, who lived the first part of his life as a loyal and productive citizen only to have his Magyar countrymen reject him as an enemy alien, treat him execrably, and render it impossible for him to remain in his homeland. “Magda, I appreciate your saying such lovely things about my father, but what can I do for you?” “Oh, please forgive me, Mr. Rubinstein! You’re a busy man, so let me get to the point. Even though I moved here from Hungary long ago, I still own two houses in my hometown of Mezőkövesd, in the Matyó region in the northeastern part of the country. . . .” “Mezőkövesd!” I exclaimed. “I know that place. My maternal grandmother’s family, the Hofstedters, lived there, and so did the Kleins, my aunt Vera’s family. My father’s family lived just down the road in Szentistván, and my mother grew up nearby in the small town of Mezőcsát.“ “That’s interesting,” Magda replied. “I had no idea where your family was from. Your father never talked about the past. Well, it seems we have even more in common than I imagined.” More in common? Dark thoughts again raced through my mind. By early 1944, the able-bodied Jewish men of the district, including my father, had been shipped off to forced-labor camps by the anti-Semitic regime of Miklós Horthy. In April a mere handful of Germans, abetted by a great many ardent Hungarian accomplices, rounded up the remaining Jews and forced them into a vile, cramped ghetto in Mezőkövesd. Soon the elderly, the women, and the children, among them my father’s wife and two small sons, would be jammed into freight trains bound for Auschwitz-Birkenau in Poland. Scarcely any would survive the gas chambers. My personal familiarity with Mezőkövesd was of more recent vintage. In 1972, I had traveled there to visit the grave of my paternal grandfather Mordekhai, who had had the good fortune to die of old age before the Germans arrived and as a consequence was the only member of the family to receive a proper Jewish burial. On my visit I was guided to the cemetery by Miska Eisler, the owner of a tiny watch-repair shop in town. As the last remaining Jew in Mezőkövesd, Miska had become by default the custodian of the community’s pitiful vestiges. It occurred to me that I was ignoring my visitor. “Sorry, Magda. You were saying that you still own two houses in Mezőkövesd.” “Yes. My parents’ home where I grew up and the house next door that I inherited from my aunt Erzsi Néni. Well, then, how shall I put it? I want to give them to you.” “Wait: you want to give them to me? Why? And why me rather than your relatives or friends?” Magda sighed. “As you know, my dear husband is gone. A few years ago, our only son, Frank, died of heart failure. Even when he was alive, his wife never wanted anything to do with me. She’s a Canadian, and we couldn’t really communicate. Also, I think she was ashamed of her in-laws. After Frank’s death, she moved with the children to Barrie, an hour away. It hurts to say this, but they have completely closed me out of their lives. They don’t even call to wish me a Merry Christmas. I’m sorry to be bothering you, but I don’t know where else to turn. I am an old, sick woman, and I have no idea about business. But if nothing is done, the houses will end up going to the government after I die, and that would be a pity.” “Magda, I’m touched, but to be honest I really don’t know about this. Does it make sense for me, living here in Canada, to own houses in Mezőkövesd? Besides, I must tell you I’d feel extremely uncomfortable receiving something to which I’m not entitled.” “Oh, Mr. Rubinstein, forgive me! I’m not good at explaining things. I didn’t mean for you to keep the houses for yourself. What I’d like you to do is sell the houses and then give the money to your people in Hungary.” Now I was really nonplussed. “But why the Jews, and why in Hungary? If you want to give away your money, shouldn’t you donate it to some charity dear to your heart, perhaps through your church?” Magda shrugged. “I have no church, and I know nothing about giving away money. What I know is that you Jews are very charitable, especially when it comes to looking after your own. Please, I beg you to take care of this for me. I’m planning to travel to Hungary in two weeks, probably for the last time. When I’m home, I’ll go to the town hall and arrange the papers you’ll need.” I still didn’t understand. But how could I refuse her? Guiding her out of the office, I wished her a safe trip. My own journey to Hungary in the summer of 1972 was unforgettable. I had long felt an urge to travel to my parents’ birthplace, but whenever I raised the subject with them, they reacted with dismay. On leaving Hungary after the war, they had vowed never to return to that accursed land. Why would I want to go there? But this was precisely what drove me: I had to understand the place they came from, the place that had nurtured and formed them only to spew them out in the end. Finally they yielded to my resolve. My primary destination was the one-time home of the Rubinstein family in the village of Szentistván, a short distance from Mezőkövesd. I arrived unannounced and certainly unexpected. Knowing that my father’s childhood chum, son of the family housekeeper, was still living in Szentistván, I asked the first villager I encountered where I might find Pista Varga. “And who might be seeking him?” “I am Béla Rubinstein’s son from Canada.” In short order, Pista was hugging and kissing me. Surrounded by what felt like the entire village population, I was embraced by stout peasant women with brightly colored headscarves and gleaming gold teeth. Clearly, they did not get many visitors here, and certainly not the offspring of expatriates. While the attention was flattering, I was unnerved by the way the villagers chattered about their former neighbors: “You know, it’s a shame the Jews are gone. They were good people, after all.”“Things just haven’t been the same without them. Everything’s old and broken.” “Someone said they heard that the Germans treated the Jews very badly when they took them away, and that they even killed many of them.” “Oh, that’s impossible! The Germans are civilized people.” “You really don’t have to worry about the Jews. They always land on their feet.” “Yes, I heard once that all the Jews emigrated to America and became millionaires.” One of the women strained her weather-beaten face toward me. “Tell us, Béla’s son: is it true that all the Jews went to America?” I was too choked up to answer. Pista took me to see my father’s once-handsome home in the center of the village. Now totally dilapidated, it had been subdivided by the postwar Communist authorities into tiny cubicles to house the indigent elderly. The entrance hall served as the village post office. My father’s flourmill, once a mainstay of the local economy, had long since been nationalized in the name of the Hungarian proletariat. It was a gutted, abandoned shambles. The entire village looked frozen in time. Like countless other Szentistváns, I thought bitterly, it would have been in far better shape had its hard-working, resourceful, tirelessly patriotic Jewish residents been left in peace. Only on returning from forced labor at the end of the war did my father learn that his wife and two sons had been shipped to their deaths in Poland. He never got over his feelings of guilt at not being there to help them when they so desperately needed him. But he had refused to allow his grief to incapacitate him. Turning his back on Hungary, he determined to build a new life in any country on the face of the earth that was prepared to take him in. Canada, the first country to open the door, proved an excellent environment for the rehabilitation of traumatized survivors. Focusing on his new reality, my father acquired real-estate holdings far in excess of what he had left behind in Szentistván. He certainly never thought of reclaiming his former home and flourmill—not even when, upon the collapse of the Communist regime in the 1990s, the new Hungarian government announced its intention to offer at least symbolic restitution to former property owners. Bill Rubinstein adamantly spurned the offer: the physical traces of his dreadful past were gone forever, and the only buildings he cared about were in the unburdened-by-history haven of Canada. Three months after Magda’s visit, a manila envelope landed on my desk. In it were two official title certificates from the Mezőkövesd land office. They described in detail two plots of land, each with a house on it; both properties were owned by Magdolna Mária Zelenka, née Lázár, born in 1937. A receipt for the issuance fee, in the amount of 12,500 Hungarian forint, was included in the envelope. Now that there was no doubting Magda’s determination, I felt obligated to honor her wish. But how to go about it? We had no one left in Hungary to whom I could turn for assistance. On the Internet, I found contact information for the Budapest Jewish community and sent several emails explaining the situation and requesting guidance. When no one responded, I rationalized to myself that at least I’d tried. As time passed, and other items accumulated on top of the manila envelope, Magda Zelenka’s houses in Mezőkövesd receded from my thoughts. Two-and-a-half years later, in June 2013, I received a letter laboriously hand-written in Hungarian. A Hungarian speaker on my staff translated it for me: Dear Mr. Rubinstein,I would like to request an appointment to meet with you in order to finalize our gifting agreement. Unfortunately, my health circumstances have changed for the worse, and I must move to a hospice where I can receive full life support. I am planning to vacate my apartment at the end of this month. Please let me know when we can meet to close any remaining issues. After that, I can be at peace in my heart knowing that everything will be in the right position to follow my inheritance wishes. Kindly contact my friend Katalin Takacs regarding the date and time of the meeting, as she will be helping me to attend. I wish all the best to you and your family. Respectfully and with love, Magda Zelenka Overcome with remorse, I immediately phoned Katalin Takacs, who informed me that Magda had been diagnosed with lung cancer and, refusing all treatment, insisted that nothing in her life was of sufficient value to justify prolonging it. All that remained was to alleviate her suffering and await the inevitable. Although she did not understand Magda’s obsession with the Mezőkövesd houses, Kathy confirmed that she spoke of little else. This only deepened my feelings of culpability. When Kathy told me she was planning to be at Magda’s apartment on June 30 to help her move to the hospice in Richmond Hill, I suggested that the three of us meet there. I found Magda seated in the kitchen, pale, stooped, and frail-looking. In a rasping voice she welcomed me and excused herself for not getting up. It was a swelteringly hot day, and to her embarrassment she couldn’t even offer tap water as her drinking glasses had been wrapped up somewhere. We sat perspiring in the tiny kitchen. I asked her to forgive me for failing to carry out her request immediately. “I’ll try to make amends now. But can you clarify something that has mystified me since we met? I understand wanting to save your inheritance from going to the government, and needing help with selling the houses. But why would you want the proceeds to be donated to Jews in Hungary?” Magda smiled weakly, and started to respond in Hungarian, with Kathy offering to interpret as needed. “Allow me to explain. In 1943, during the war, I was living with my parents and brother in our family home in Mezőkövesd. My father had these two good friends whom he had known since childhood. They were both Jewish, and as it happens, they were both watch repairmen. . . .” “I bet I know the name of one of your father’s friends,” I interrupted. The two women looked at each other in puzzlement. Born after my parents left Hungary, and raised in Canada, how could I possibly be familiar with a wartime friend of Magda’s father? “Miska Eisler, right?” Magda was astounded. I explained how I met Eisler more than 40 years ago when I’d traveled to Mezőkövesd in search of my grandfather’s grave. How many Jewish watch repairmen could there be in a small place like Mezőkövesd? “That is an interesting coincidence. My father’s other friend was also a Miska, Miska Szép. Well, the problem was that the government considered the Jews to be enemies of the Hungarian people, and passed all kinds of laws restricting them. Jews couldn’t marry Magyars, Jews couldn’t have Magyars working in their homes, and Jews couldn’t own businesses. Also, Jews and Magyars were forbidden to have social relations. My father thought this last law was particularly ridiculous, and so he just ignored it. He didn’t try to hide his friendship with the two Miskas, even though he knew it could get him into serious trouble. “Sure enough, there were consequences. My father developed a reputation as a Jew-lover, and therefore a disloyal Magyar. It got to the point where no one was willing to employ him, and he was finally forced to seek work in another town. The neighbors started to shun our entire family; the children at school refused to play with my brother and me. For us at home, the stress was almost unbearable. My mother was furious with my father for being so reckless, and so insensitive to the impact of his behavior on his family.” Magda related how it all came to a head one Sunday morning. Everyone in the Lázár family had gone to church—except Marton Lázár, who thought the priest was a hypocrite for preaching brotherly love while ignoring the disgraceful treatment of the Jews. On this Sunday, he proclaimed, he would demonstrate proper Christian virtue by keeping his Jewish buddies company. After church, the family waited at home for the head of the household to appear for Sunday dinner. When he finally walked through the door, all hell broke loose. Mária Lázár, red-faced and quivering, ripped into her husband. “You evil man! Shame on you! What kind of person brings such humiliation and hardship upon his family? What future can there possibly be for our children? You have ruined everything. And all because of those stinking zsidók. Everyone knows the Jews cause trouble wherever they go. That’s why everyone hates them and why the government has to control them. Otherwise, they’d take over our country.” At this point, six-year-old Magda could no longer contain herself. “Please, Anyu, stop! Apu is right. It is the government that’s evil, not him. There is nothing wrong with his Jewish friends: they are people just like us, and Mezőkövesd is their home as much as it is ours. Shame on everyone for allowing the Jews to be treated so terribly!” Glaring at her mother, she then blurted out impulsively: “Just wait, Anyu! When I grow up—and when you get old and die—and when I inherit this house—I’m going to give it to the Jews!” Kathy and I sat, stunned, but Magda wore a look of profound serenity: her secret was finally out. And then it was Kathy’s turn. Liberated by the release of Magda’s demon, she volunteered that before she was born, her mother had worked as a housekeeper for a Jewish family in Hungary who had treated her with great kindness until, with the passage of the anti-Jewish laws, they were forced to sever relations. To Kathy, those laws were a shameful stain on the honor of the Hungarian people, and she was now determined to do everything in her power to help fulfill Magda’s wish. But it would not be easy. Things had taken another turn in present-day Hungary. Riding a wave of political and economic malaise, the far-Right Jobbik party had shot to third place in the most recent elections. High on its long list of grievances was the claim that foreign Jews were buying up properties throughout the country with the intention of importing “Israelis” to colonize Hungary and eventually take it over. Kathy had heard that Jobbik was keeping a sharp eye on all real-estate transactions. A Rubinstein from Canada acquiring houses in Mezőkövesd would surely trigger an alarm. I assured Kathy that knowing this, I was all the more bent on forging ahead. Over the following months, demonstrating extraordinary dedication and persistence, Kathy undertook to travel repeatedly to Mezőkövesd, conducting meetings and exchanging numerous phone calls and e-mails until she successfully concluded the sale of both houses. On the advice of a local lawyer, she had the proceeds deposited directly into a trust account, thereby avoiding any involvement by me. Magda then signed a separate document granting me exclusive control over the disposition of the funds. By now, I knew what to do. A year earlier, I had read a front-page news story about CsanádSzegedy, a rising young Hungarian rabble-rouser who had served as Jobbik’s vice-president and its representative to the European Parliament. He was especially notorious for his inflammatory comments about Jews, whom he accused of trying to seize economic control of Hungary. He complained loudly about the supposed Jewishness of Hungary’s political elites, who he claimed were “desecrating national symbols.” But his abrasive manner earned him enemies within his own party. One day, to his horror, an opponent confronted Szegedy with the dramatic revelation that his own maternal grandparents were Jews. In an instant, his world came crashing down. Although retaining his seat in the European Parliament, he was abruptly forced out of Jobbik. In a state of deep personal turmoil, he went to visit his grandmother, who confirmed not only that she was Jewish but that she was a survivor of Auschwitz, where all the other members of her immediate family had been murdered. After the war, she met and married Szegedy’s grandfather, a Jewish survivor of a forced-labor camp. I was immediately struck by the details of this story, which reminded me powerfully of the story of my own parents. Indeed, the wartime facts of the two families were virtually interchangeable. All were small-town Orthodox Jews. In each case, the woman survived Auschwitz and the man survived forced-labor camp. Particularly eerie was the fact that both men had lost their first wives and two children to the gas chambers. It was only post-liberation that the lives of the two couples diverged radically. Concluding that there was no future for them as Jews in Hungary, my parents had left to build a new and better life elsewhere. Szegedy’s grandparents, having reached the same despairing conclusion, remained in Hungary but set about obliterating their Jewish identity. If my mother, as a mark of honor, routinely displayed the blue Auschwitz number tattooed on her forearm, Szegedy’s grandmother just as routinely concealed her tattoo under long sleeves. And whereas my Canadian-born-and-raised children have always been perfectly comfortable in their Jewish skins, Csanád Szegedy, their Hungarian-born-and-raised contemporary, became a scourge of his own people. And yet: having fortuitously discovered the Jew buried deep within him, Szegedy next sought out the help of Slomó Köves, a young Chabad rabbi in Budapest whose family had long denied its own Jewish identity. I was struck by the generosity of the rabbi’s response to this former vilifier, and by his courage in standing up to his scandalized congregants when Szegedy started attending synagogue. Gradually, under Rabbi Köves’ tutelage, Csanád Szegedy had been making amends for his deplorable conduct by learning to be a self-respecting Jew. Stirred by this turn of events, I contacted Rabbi Köves and told him about the simple Hungarian working woman in Toronto who was determined to make amends in her own way for the moral lapses of her compatriots. We agreed that I would have the funds from the sale of Magda’s houses wired to his organization, the EMIH Unified Hungarian Jewish Congregation. A letter from him in Hungarian would follow, acknowledging and thanking her for the gift and allowing her at last to enjoy inner peace, content in the knowledge that her lifelong mission had finally been accomplished. Rabbi Köves and I also agreed that it would be fitting to memorialize Magda’s gift with a plaque on the wall of his congregation’s building in Budapest. When I mentioned this to Magda over the phone, she protested, characteristically, that it was unnecessary. To persuade her otherwise, I stressed the importance of people knowing that there were Righteous Gentiles even in Hungary—and that her dear father had been one of them. Relenting, she approved the following text: Robert Eli Rubinstein, a businessman and communal leader in Toronto, Canada, is the author of An Italian Renaissance: Choosing Life in Canada, an account of his parents’ post-Holocaust reconstruction of their lives. The book was a recipient of the 2011 Canadian Jewish Book Award. Eli Rubinstein and his wife Renee are traveling on the 2014 March of the Living.
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