Exactly 50 years after Nazi forces took control of Budapest and Adolf Eichmann ordered 50,000 Hungarian Jews to march to Germany as slave laborers, a Jewish community center was festively inaugurated in Hungary’s capital.
The rebuilt Balint Jewish Community Center of Budapest will serve as a social and educational center for Hungary’s estimated 130,000 Jews.
It contains a library stocked with books and video and audio tapes, a teacher resource center linked by computer to universities all over the world and an arts and crafts center. The community center, with a 10-person staff, also provides counseling, support groups and social programs for Holocaust survivors and their families.
It is housed in a two-story stucco building which belonged to Budapest’s Jewish community before World War II, when it was confiscated by the Nazi regime. It was recently returned to the Jews of the capital by the Hungarian government.
The building was refurbished with funding from the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee and England’s Central British Fund –World Relief, among other groups.
“This is the first full-service Jewish community center since the Holocaust in the former Communist bloc,” said Moshe Jahoda, the JDC’s representative in Hungary, in a telephone interview from Budapest.
An audience of some 300 people, including local residents and Hungarian, Israeli, American and British dignitaries, looked on as a Jewish children’s choir sang “Sholom Aleichem” and students from the Anne Frank Jewish High School performed Jewish folk-dances.
According to JDC spokesperson Amir Shaviv, who attended the ceremony, Hungarian Minister of Welfare Pal Kovacs said at the inauguration that the country has “a past to remember. My government has apologized to the Jewish community for what happened here during the Holocaust.
“We believe that this center will do something (to combat) hatred and intolerance and we would like it to be an example copied all over Hungary,” he said.
Also in attendance, Shaviv said in a telephone interview, were the U.S. and Israeli ambassadors to Hungary, Donald Blinken and Joel Alon.
While under communist rule, Hungary’s Jewish community was estimated to number 80,000.
Since then, tens of thousands of Hungarians have acknowledged their Jewish heritage and begun to seek ties to organized Jewish life. The community is now thought to number 130,000 countrywide, with some 80,000 residing in the capital.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
