Aser Rona is answering the spiritual needs of his community.
Hungary’s approximately 80,000 Hungarian Jews are slowly recovering from half a century in which first they endured a “physical” Holocaust, then what some describe as four decades of a Communist-induced “spiritual” Holocaust.
With a double-generation gap in religious observance, there are depressingly few people who know anything about Judaism’s traditions.
Rona saw this as a challenge.
After flirting with the idea of making aliyah five years ago, he enrolled at the Jewish Theological Seminary in Budapest, the only rabbinical training facility in Eastern Europe.
Next year, he will be ordained as a rabbi.
“I feel even more deeply now that Hungarian Jewry needs us, all of us,” said the lean and bearded 23-year-old.
“Except for a small minority, nobody knows anything about Judaism — how to pray, how to read Torah.”
Rona is among the swelling ranks of young Hungarian Jews dedicating themselves to the community’s renaissance.
Within a year, the community will have a new spiritual “incubator” — the Pedagogium of Budapest, which is slated to become a rarity in Eastern Europe: a Jewish university.
The announcement to open the school was made earlier this month by a visiting delegation of the Conservative movement’s Seminary of Judaic Studies in Jerusalem, which will run the Pedagogium’s educational programs.
The seminary, also known as the Bet Midrash, is a graduate school of Jewish studies affiliated with the Conservative, or Masorti, movement in Israel.
The Pedagogium will have three faculties, some of which are already in operation:
The Jewish Teachers Institute;
The School for Jewish Community Workers, which already confers B.A. and graduate degrees; and
Budapest’s Jewish Theological Seminary, which was incorporated into the Pedagogium in September.
A fourth faculty, for liturgy, is being planned.
The Pedagogium, said members of the Israeli delegation, will fortify the communal pillars — spiritual guidance, prayer, schools and social programs – – to allow Hungarian Jewry to flourish once again.
“If there’s a chance for Jewish life to re-emerge here, it’s going to depend on one thing — Jewish education,” said Rabbi David Clayman, director of the American Jewish Congress office in Israel.
“You can’t live Jewishly and create Jewishly unless you know what Jewish is.”
Budapest’s teacher-training college was founded in 1857, but shut down in 1948 when Communist rule was imposed.
When the Communist regime fell in 1989, reopening the facility was one of the first steps taken by the Jewish community.
The rabbinical seminary, on the other hand, opened its doors in 1880 and stayed open throughout communism.
It was the token religious institution for Hungarian Jewry, producing rabbis, cantors and scribes.
The Communists left it unfettered in order to produce propaganda for Western consumption about how they were nursing a ravaged community back to health.
Still, the seminary was an oasis in the spiritual wasteland of communism, said the current director, Rabbi Alfred Schoner, a student here in the early 1970s.
“It was the main point of continuity for the Jewish community,” said the Hungarian-born Schoner, who made aliyah in 1990, but was dispatched back to Budapest by Bet Midrash in early 1996 to oversee the seminary’s revival.
Over the years, the seminary has produced more than 300 rabbis.
Bet Midrash will raise the funds needed to bolster the Pedagogium’s seminary and other faculties and help it attain state accreditation.
An estimated $250,000 per year will be needed to supply it with ample full-time faculty and resources, said Rabbi Benjamin Segal, the Bet Midrash president.
Once it begins meeting the needs of Hungarian Jews, the Pedagogium may expand to serve Jews elsewhere in Eastern Europe.
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.
