Power and Powerlessness in Central Europe

Impressive as Budapest’s Dohany Street Synagogue may be, the most significant thing about it is not what you see, but what you don’t. Last week, together with about forty-five congregants, I returned from our synagogue trip to Prague and Budapest, planned by Rabbi Savenor, co-chairs Vicki Warner and Ilene Penn, and the professionals at Da’at. Aside from the thrill of watching the Cubs win the World Series on an iPhone in the Prague airport at 5:00 am, the most awe-inspiring moment of the whole trip was taking in the magnificence of the largest synagogue in Europe and second largest of the world. The exterior – breathtaking; the interior – stunning; the Haftorah I chanted there – a YouTube sensation. With seating for 3,000 and standing room for an additional 2,000, the Dohany towers over our modest little shtiebel here on the Upper East Side. And yet, as our group stood there taking in this immense architectural feat, my thoughts turned to what we couldn’t see, what used to be there, at Dohany Street No. 2: the two-story classical-style home in which Theodore Herzl, the founder of political Zionism, was born and raised.

Herzl’s birthplace and the Dohany Synagogue on the same Budapest block: it is an image worth reflecting on. Consecrated in 1859, the Dohany synagogue is, if nothing else, big. It exudes the self-confidence of a Jewish community that is both affluent and self-assured, secure in its relationship with its neighbors and their government; most of all, it makes a grand assertion that roots are being put down, that this is a Jewish community that is here and here to stay. All of which makes it so jarring that just one year later, in 1860, Theodore Herzl would arrive in the world at that very spot. More than any other figure of modern Jewish history, it was Herzl who understood the precarious, vulnerable, and fleeting nature of Jewish life in the diaspora. Herzl, who as a correspondent for a Viennese paper witnessed the trumped-up charges of treason against the French army captain Alfred Dreyfus, a man brought down by institutional and populist anti-Semitism. Herzl, who reasoned that the only place that Jews could be both fully Jewish and full citizens of the world would be in a state of their own. I imagine Herzl going back to his hometown in the late 1890s as his Zionist leadership took hold – perhaps bringing his kids to see the grandparents –looking up at the Dohany next-door to which he grew up and saying to himself: “We Jews are fooling ourselves. How very naïve this monumental delusion of a building. What we should really be building is a Jewish state.” Neither in 1859 nor in 1899 could anyone have imagined the horrors that awaited Europe’s Jews, how prophetic Herzl concerns would be. In Hungary alone 600,000 murdered; the Dohany, the architectural jewel of Jewish Europe, reduced to a stable in Nazi hands. In the intervening years, the synagogue has been restored, but the juxtaposition and lingering questions remain. Our group stood there reflecting on the world that once was, the confidence the Jews must have had, the narrative which gave them comfort, and then the horror that would come. A European Jewry navigating between power and powerlessness, permanence and impermanence, vibrancy and vulnerability. A story that we discovered is still playing out today.

For me, it was this thread that framed our trip. We began in the Czech Republic, in Prague, a city with a continuous Jewish presence for some 1000 years. Prague is a city that gave life to great luminaries of our people, from the sixteenth-century philosopher and mathematician David Gans, to great philanthropists like Mordechai Maisel, to one of the most significant thought leaders of our people, Rabbi Judah Loew, better known as the Maharal of Prague. Known not just for his knowledge of our tradition, but for his ability to integrate the emerging scientific picture of the universe into his (pre-Enlightenment) thinking, the Maharal was a rabbi both intellectually and personally engaged with the world around him. He had an audience and rumored friendship with Emperor Rudolf II. And yet despite his stature, were you to ask anyone what the Maharal is best known for, they would share with you the legend of the Golem, the Frankenstein-esque creation that he is said to have set into motion in order to save the Jews again and again in their hour of need. The point is not whether the Golem was a legend created by the Maharal or by later generations; the point is that the Golem is a projection of all the anxieties of a diaspora Jewish community not altogether secure in their surroundings.

The tensions were not just those of physical security, nor particular to the sixteenth century. We visited the home of Franz Kafka, interestingly, a contemporary of Herzl. Kafka is perhaps the paradigmatic example of a Jew giving expression to his unsure place in this world, alienated from his surroundings and his self, going to sleep in one skin and waking up in another. To go to Prague is to witness the ongoing efforts of Jews to come to terms with the disorienting perplexities and insecurities of their Jewish selves in a non-Jewish world.

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.