Five new Jewish schools opened in Eastern Europe this week, three of them in the Soviet Union and two in Hungary.
The Soviet Union’s new schools opened in Leningrad; Vilna (Vilnius), Lithuania; and Tallinn, Estonia. The Jewish Agency has provided curricula and teachers for the schools, including programs for Hebrew, Zionist studies, Jewish history and Jewish culture.
The new schools in Budapest — two elementary schools and a kindergarten — enhance a Jewish community whose educational infrastructure is thriving, due in part to the help given by Hungarian Jews living in the West and also through the substantive technical assistance of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee.
The new schools fill a void created by over 40 years of Communist rule and the destruction of the Holocaust. Prior to the war, there were 147 Jewish elementary schools in Hungary and numerous Jewish high schools.
About two dozen Jewish elementary schools were reopened after the war and five Jewish high schools. But by 1948, the Communist government had restructured the schools and began closing down Jewish publications. By 1953, formal Jewish life was over.
On Sunday, the first Jewish day school in Hungary since then was opened at 44 Wesselenyi Street, on the site where a Jewish elementary school once stood.
The school, which is educating at least 520 children from first to ninth grade, was established by the American Endowment Fund for Hungarian Jewry, a group of private investors in the United States and Canada.
Toronto real estate mogul Albert Reichmann, who is chairman of the fund, signed agreements in January with the Hungarian Ministry of Cultural Affairs and the Finance Ministry to transfer the building, which for many years was government property, to the Jewish community. The school has a lease of 50 years.
JDC prepared the way for the school’s creation by bringing seven educators from Hungary to day schools in Montreal and New York to show them how Jewish schools function.
The teachers and the Hebrew principal at the newly opened school are from Israel. At least two children in attendance have come from Scandinavia.
(JTA staff writer Susan Birnbaum in New York contributed to this report.)
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