Jews of Hungary: A Golden Age Shattered

The Congress That Split a Community

In the winter of 1868-1869, the Jews of Hungary gathered for a congress that would shape their community for generations. The congress was convened to create a unified organizational structure for Hungarian Jewry — and it failed spectacularly, splitting the community into three factions that persist to this day.

The Neolog faction — progressive, acculturated, Hungarian-speaking — wanted moderate reforms: sermons in Hungarian rather than Yiddish, choral music in synagogues, and a modern rabbinical seminary. The Orthodox faction, led by the spiritual heirs of Rabbi Moshe Schreiber (the Chatam Sofer, d. 1839) — particularly his son the Ketav Sofer — rejected all reforms as violations of tradition. A third group, the Status Quo, declined to join either camp.

This three-way split was unique in the Jewish world. Nowhere else did the internal divisions of Jewish life become so formalized, so institutional, and so permanent. The split also meant that Hungarian Jewish life was extraordinarily diverse — from the strictly Orthodox Hasidic courts of the northeast to the thoroughly acculturated Neolog congregations of Budapest.

The Golden Age

The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were a golden age for Hungarian Jewry. Jews constituted roughly 5% of Hungary’s population but played outsized roles in commerce, industry, the professions, and culture.

Budapest became one of Europe’s great Jewish cities. Jews founded banks, built factories, published newspapers, and created cultural institutions. The Budapest Opera, the National Theater, and the city’s literary life all bore deep Jewish imprints. Jewish families like the Goldbergers (textiles), the Weisses (steel), and the Kornfelds (banking) were pillars of the Hungarian economy.

Hungarian Jews also made extraordinary contributions to science and intellectual life. The roster of Hungarian-born Jewish scientists is staggering: John von Neumann (mathematics and computing), Leo Szilard (nuclear physics), Edward Teller (physics), Eugene Wigner (physics, Nobel laureate), Michael Polanyi (chemistry and philosophy), and Dennis Gabor (inventor of holography, Nobel laureate). The concentration of genius was so remarkable that physicist Leo Szilard jokingly attributed it to Martians — saying that Hungarians were actually from Mars, which explained both their strange language and their extraordinary abilities.

The Neolog rabbinical seminary in Budapest — the Landesrabbinerschule, established in 1877 — was one of the finest institutions of Jewish learning in Europe, training rabbis who combined traditional scholarship with modern academic methods. It remains in operation today, the oldest functioning rabbinical seminary in the world.

The Catastrophe

The golden age was shattered with a speed and violence that still stuns historians.

Hungary had been an ally of Nazi Germany since 1940, and anti-Jewish legislation had been in effect since 1938. But Hungary’s government, under Regent Miklós Horthy, had resisted German pressure to deport the Jewish population. By early 1944, Hungary was home to approximately 825,000 Jews — the largest surviving Jewish community in Nazi-dominated Europe.

On March 19, 1944, Germany occupied Hungary. Adolf Eichmann arrived in Budapest personally to oversee the deportation of Hungarian Jews.

What followed was genocide at a pace unprecedented even by the Nazis’ horrific standards. Within weeks, Jews in the provinces were concentrated into ghettos. Between May 15 and July 9, 1944 — less than two months — approximately 437,000 Jews were deported from the Hungarian countryside to Auschwitz-Birkenau. At the peak of the deportations, four trains per day delivered 12,000 to 14,000 Jews to the gas chambers.

The vast majority were murdered immediately upon arrival. The crematoria and gas chambers at Auschwitz-Birkenau, already operating for two years, ran at maximum capacity. The operation was so enormous that the Nazis dug open-air burning pits to supplement the ovens.

The Budapest Exception

The Jews of Budapest were largely spared the mass deportation — not through any moral awakening but through a combination of international pressure, military developments, and individual heroism.

By the summer of 1944, the war was turning against Germany. Allied bombing was intensifying. Horthy, facing international condemnation and hoping to negotiate with the Allies, halted the deportations in July 1944 before the Budapest Jews could be transported.

But the danger did not end. In October 1944, Horthy was overthrown and replaced by the Arrow Cross — Hungary’s fascist movement. The Arrow Cross militiamen terrorized Budapest’s Jews with savage violence. Thousands were shot on the banks of the Danube, their bodies falling into the river.

It was during this period that Raoul Wallenberg, Carl Lutz (the Swiss consul), and other diplomats performed their extraordinary rescue efforts. Wallenberg’s protective passports and safe houses saved tens of thousands. Other rescue efforts — by the International Red Cross, by Catholic clergy, by individual Hungarians who hid their neighbors — saved thousands more.

When the Soviet army liberated Budapest in February 1945, approximately 119,000 Jews were still alive in the city. But the Hungarian Jewish community as a whole had been devastated. Of the approximately 825,000 Jews living in greater Hungary before the war, roughly 565,000 had been murdered — including nearly all of those outside Budapest.

The Postwar Community

After the war, Hungary’s surviving Jewish community — centered in Budapest — rebuilt under extraordinarily difficult circumstances. The Communist regime that took power in 1948 nationalized Jewish communal property, suppressed religious life, and forced Jews to choose between assimilation and emigration.

Many left — for Israel, for America, for Western Europe. Those who remained lived in a society that officially denied the Jewish dimension of the Holocaust, referring to victims as “anti-fascist martyrs” rather than as Jews murdered for being Jewish.

The fall of Communism in 1989 opened a new chapter. Hungarian Jewish life experienced a revival — synagogues were restored, cultural organizations were founded, and a new generation began exploring its Jewish identity. The Dohány Street Synagogue complex was restored to its former grandeur. Jewish festivals, cultural events, and educational programs flourished.

Today, Hungary’s Jewish community numbers approximately 75,000-100,000, making it the largest in Central Europe outside of the former Soviet Union. Most live in Budapest. The community is diverse — from the strictly Orthodox to the completely secular — and increasingly engaged with its own history.

The Shoes on the Danube

Among the most powerful Holocaust memorials in the world are the Shoes on the Danube Bank in Budapest — sixty pairs of iron shoes, cast in 1940s styles, placed along the river’s edge to commemorate the Jews who were forced to remove their shoes before being shot by Arrow Cross militiamen in the winter of 1944-1945.

The memorial is unspeakably moving. The shoes are ordinary — men’s, women’s, children’s. Some are heeled, some flat, some tiny. They are empty. They line the riverbank where real people once stood, facing the water, knowing what was about to happen.

The story of Hungarian Jewry is the story of what can be built and what can be destroyed. It is a story of genius and creativity — the scientists, the artists, the rabbis, the entrepreneurs who made Budapest one of Europe’s most brilliant cities. And it is a story of how quickly brilliance can be extinguished, how completely a community can be shattered, and how courageously survivors and their descendants can begin again.