Fulbright Friday #2 - The Jewish District

Our second Fulbright Friday took place in Budapest, specifically the Jewish District of the city. We started out with a walk around the area of the city that was heavily inhabited by Jewish people before WW2. I am going to try to take you on the tour with me by posting my pictures and explaining then as we go.

This is one of the original buildings where Jewish people lived in Budapest

Being Hungarian and Jewish were both very important to Hungarian Jews. The marking on the left is the seal of Hungary and on the right is the Star of David. Both were inscribed on the original building above at the same time illustrating the equal importance of their nationality and religion.

The far stone wall (through the archway) is part of the wall that housed the large Jewish ghetto in Budapest from 1944 until the end of the war. For most of the war, Jews were not forced into ghettos in Budapest because the government hoped that it would discourage any Allied bombing of the city. That changed in 1944 after Hitler invaded the city and forced the ghettoization and removal of 400,000+ Jewish citizens within 2 months. This was the fasted deportation of Jews in the entire war.

Memorial to Carl Lutz who saved 60,000 Jews in Budapest. He gave them false papers that said they had permission to travel to Palestine and could not be deported.

The Great Synagogue of Budapest. It is the 2nd largest synagogue in the world (the largest is in NYC) but holds the most people.

This is inside the Great Synagogue. Traditionally, during services, Jewish women would sit in the upper balconies and men would sit on the ground floor. This was done to keep men and women separate so no one was distracted. The upper balconies used to be covered with fabric curtains so the women were concealed behind them, but this is no longer done.

The alter of the Great Synagogue

During WW2, 27 bombs hit the Great Synagogue, but it never collapsed. It obviously needed major renovation which began in 1991 after the Communist regime left the country. The renovation took 6 years.

Next to the Great Synagogue is a cemetery holding the bodies of the people who died in the ghetto and were only found and buried after the ghetto was liberated. Most of the people could not be identified or had no family left to identify them. The bodies were buried in several mass graves behind the Synagogue. Family members who were still alive and able to identify a body, placed memorial stones over the mass grave where their loved one was interred. In all, there are over 2,300 people buried in this cemetery.  

These two pictures are of the Tree Memorial which is also outside the Great Synagogue. It is a Weeping Willow for obvious reasons and if you were to vertically flip the tree 180 degrees it would be a Menorah.  

The leaves have names of Holocaust victims on them, but there are also many leaves left blank to represent the victims who are not named.

The alter of the Orthodox Synagogue. This alter is in the middle of the main floor, instead of at the front like the Great Synagogue and most Christian churches. 

The inside of the Orthodox Synagogue. Again, you can see the balconies that separate men and women during services.

What the Orthodox Synagogue looked like after WW2. It had been used as a stable for horses.Today it has been restored to its original beauty.

After we toured the Synagogues we went to the Holocaust Memorial Museum, which focused primarily on Hungary's experience in WW2 and the plight of Hungary's Jewish and Roma populations. Some of the information I knew already, but I learned a lot more specifics about Hungary's role in WW2 and the horrifying fate of its Jewish population. I was unaware that Hungary was talking with the Allies in WW2, trying to remove itself from the Axis Powers, which prompted Hitler to invade the country at the end of 1943. By the beginning of 1944 the Jewish people of Budapest were in ghettos and being deported to concentration camps. 1 out of 10 Jews in the Holocaust were from Hungary. 1 out of 3 people in Auschwitz were Hungarian.

The layout of the museum was perfect for its topic. Interestingly, the exhibit didn't follow chronological order; instead it was organized by the various phases of persecution (the deprivation of rights, freedom, human dignity, and life) the victims endured leading up to and during WW2/the Holocaust. Each section focused on that phase from its beginning to the end of the war and beyond if applicable, and then started all over with the beginning of the next phase in the next section. If you are like me and tend to like learning things in a linear fashion, this had the effect of keeping you slightly off-balance in your knowledge of what was happening.  I found this to be a successful way to give the tiniest echo of how people living during that time must have felt when they had no idea what was going to happen next.

It was dark in the museum, with the main source of light coming from the lights that illuminated the artifacts, signs, and pictures.  The path was twisty and wound around from sign to sign in each room.

In addition to the informational signs, there were lots of pictures and videos of historical images as well as images of the victims that were really hard to look at. Many of the rooms were dominated by huge projection screens showing videos about the particular phase of the room. These projection screens became especially noteworthy at the end, during the phases of the deprivation of human dignity and life, when they showed images of the victims of the Holocaust. The screens, and thus the pictures and the horror, were inescapable. In addition, the museum provided information about the fate of individuals and families. So often, in tragedies of this magnitude, history tends to gloss over the individual stories in favor of the bigger picture. By tracing the history of specific people and families, and allowing us to read the stories of the people whose images we were looking at, the museum personalized the horror of the Holocaust.

For a long time, I tried to think of how to put into words how impactful this day was to me and everyone else at Fulbright and found I just couldn't do it. Instead of trying to find the words, I want to share the reaction of everyone I was with as we made our way through the museum because I think this speaks louder than any of my words ever could. When we first began walking through the exhibit, people were moving together in small groups from exhibit to exhibit and making comments to each other about the artifacts, pictures, and music, just like usual in a museum. However, as we continued, the groups got smaller and smaller and the conversations got less and less. By the end of experience, we were all separated from each other, no one was speaking, and we were surrounded by a solemn, horrified silence which continued even after we left the exhibit area of the museum.  I think there are times in life when words are unnecessary and superfluous to understanding how people feel, and this was one of those times.