Power and Powerlessness in Central Europe
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Today there are only a few thousand Jews left in Prague; it is more like a Jewish museum than anything else. But to visit Prague is to come face-to-face with a world that once was. When we visited the concentration camp Theresienstadt, where nearly 150,000 Jews were killed or sent to death, we left with a sense of the music, theatre, scholarship, poetry, and art of Czech Jewry. A community that from the Maharal to Kafka and everyone in between had so much to offer the world, but never would, and now, save for a struggling few, never will. I, for one, will no longer enter this sanctuary in the same way, knowing that on display is a Torah retrieved from a destroyed Czech community. Unfit for use, it is a symbol of a world that once was, a culture and community that not even the Golem itself could have saved from the hands of the Nazis.
As we went from Prague to Budapest, our questions about Jewish past, present and future grew more, not less, textured. While anti-Jewish laws were on the books beginning in 1938, the bottom did not fall out for Hungarian Jewry until very late in the war – spring of 1944, when the German occupation began. Over the course of the next two months, over 400,000 Jews were deported to Auschwitz to be murdered, an effort that could not have been accomplished without the willing collaboration of Hungarians themselves, their devotion to the Final Solution surprising even Eichmann himself. Of all the memorials we saw, the most sobering was sixty pairs of rusted shoes on the promenade of the Danube, a testament to the 10-15,000 civilians, mostly Jews, who were lined up and shot into the river by the pro-German, anti-Semitic Arrow Cross Party. The story of Hungarian Jewry in the Shoah is one that must be understood in its fullness. Be it the collaboration of the local populace, the heroism of Hungarian-born Hannah Senesh, or the quiet and sometimes controversial attempts of Jew or gentile to save Jewish lives, to study the Hungarian chapter of the Holocaust is to encounter a vivid mixture of hope, defiance, heroism, and inescapable tragedy.
But what we discovered in Hungary was that the questions we were asking were not situated only in the past, but very much in the present and the future. The rise of a far right party in Hungary is making for a problematic present. On the one hand, I felt totally safe walking the streets with a yarmulke, far safer than I do in other European cities. Hungary’s anti-immigrant policies give it a calm I have not seen elsewhere. And yet, we discovered, the Jewish community is understandably concerned with the rise of fascist politics. The monuments we saw memorialized the Hungarian victims of the German occupation, ignoring the fact of Hungarian collaboration, not to mention that the Shoah was a calamity inflicted specifically on the Jewish people. It is not just the loss of democracy in Hungary that is worrisome, or the dishonoring of Jewish lives. At stake is the question of the safety and security of a present-day community of some 100,000 Budapest Jews who themselves are seeking to understand, no differently than those who came before, just how safe and secure they really are. Do they stay or do they go? Our return to the States the day before the election has only further stirred our concerns as all of us realize that the emergence of a populist rhetoric of hate is not limited to one side of the Atlantic. None of us, it would seem, are immune to the inconvenient truth that we are living through a time of dramatic change in our political climate.
Yet, even with all our concerns, we saw wonderful pockets of hope. One evening we visited the Balint house, the JDC-funded JCC of Budapest. We saw young children learning to read Hebrew, teenagers taking krav maga (Israeli martial arts), and we sang and danced with Holocaust survivors. We had dinner with counselors of the Sarvash camp – an intensive ten-day summer camp, also funded by the JDC, that is reinvigorating Jewish life and living in central and Eastern Europe. We joined a Neolog synagogue for Friday night services and were overjoyed by their hospitality and vitality and by the charismatic leadership of their rabbi and rebbetzin. Hungarian Jewry is not what it once was, not even close. Like Isaac following the Akedah, they are still descending from the mountaintop, forever diminished by the Shoah, struggling to rebuild after decades of communist rule. They are, nevertheless, energetic, scrappy, actively working to chart out a future and altogether deserving of our support. Wherever their path should lead, I look forward to finding ways our synagogue can partner with them into the years ahead, all the more so should the political landscape turn dark once again.
Grand as the Dohany was, hospitable as our Friday night hosts were, it is the brief Minha (afternoon) service that our group prayed at Theresienstadt that I will not soon forget. Despite being incarcerated in the hell of the Terezin ghetto, Jews found the courage to turn a tiny storeroom into a secret prayer space. It was too small for our whole group to fit in, so we prayed outside, all of us pondering the quality of the faith that must have been given expression between those narrow walls. The passage of time and the effects of the elements have not been kind to the room, but one could still make out the Hebrew letters etched onto the walls – one wall asking God to deliver Israel from distress; another, calling on God to have mercy; the third, a reminder not to forget Jerusalem; and the last one pleading to behold God’s return to Zion. The setting was, if nothing else, a monument to the tragedy of diaspora existence: the powerlessness, the vulnerability, the fate of a European Jewry who could build the Dohany and then in the following decades be reduced to building secret prayer closets.
As with any great educational experience, we came home with more questions than answers, not only about the past, but about our present and the future: questions we must ask as a congregation and as a Jewish people, questions to which we must work to find answers – thus ensuring a vital future for European Jewry and for us all.