Monday, September 06, 2010

HUNGARY'S 190 YEAR OLD OBUDA SYNAGOGUE RE-OPENS


JPOST:
"This is the best, most respectable answer to Nazism and anti-Semitism, who once removed us from here, and proof that the people of Israel live – Am Israel Chai,” Chief Ashkenazi Rabbi Yona Metzger said on Sunday, at the re-dedication of the Óbuda Synagogue in Budapest.

In a ceremony attended by Hungarian deputy prime minister, local dignitaries and rabbis, as well as some 1,500 members of the local Jewish communities, Metzger also said a special prayer of thanks on the occasion that after over 50 years, and a few days before Rosh Hashana, "these walls will again be witness to prayer and a Torah scroll.”

The Israeli chief rabbi, who met with new Hungarian President Pál Schmitt earlier in the day, also noted the Hungarian government's support of the local "religious renaissance” in Jewish life. Letters of blessing from Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, President Shimon Peres and Religious Affairs Minister Yaakov Mergi were also read at the event.

The reopening of Hungary's oldest synagogue, built 190 years ago, marks another step in the arduous resurgence of Jewish life in Hungary after Nazism and decades of an anti-religious communist regime.

It was young, Hungarian born Rabbi Slomó Köves, head of the orthodox United Hungarian Jewish Congregation (EMIH), who last year began to seek out a new building that could serve as a synagogue to accomodate the growing community's needs. He suggested to real-estate developer Gábor Futó a certain structure that was on the market. Futó rejected that option, already knowing which building was the one that would serve their end instead.

In 1993, 17-year-old Futó took part in an televised atomic physics competition for youth. In one of the final stages of the contest, the participants had to determine where the North was, using a radioactive element.

The event took place in a old yellow neoclassical building, serving the television studio, near the Danube in the Obuda neighborhood. Previously, there was a textile museum in the site. But Futó knew that he was standing in a synagogue. Given that the Jewish place of prayer would be pointing eastward, to Jerusalem, Futó took what he thought was an educated guess, based on what appeared to be the front of the building's interior.

"I was actually wrong,” he told The Jerusalem Post with a laugh on Sunday, "It was impossible to tell, since the building was in such bad shape.”

Despite that error, young Futó won first place, and ever since was disturbed by the fact that the Jewish place of prayer was serving other means so alien to its designation. So when Köves approached him, he knew that the old building, which the television studio had in the meanwhile left, was the perfect choice to regain its original destination and host once again Jewish prayer in its capacity as the Obuda Synagogue, and used all his energy to advance that end.

To Futó, there is nothing questionable about reaffiring Jewish presence in a continent that saw some of history's worst atrocities to Jews.

"Jews have been here for many centuries, my own family has been here since the 18th century,” he said. "This is a strong community, not necessarily in the religious sense, but rather bound through communal aspects, a group belonging.” There are currently believed to be 100,000 Jews living in Hungary, though not all consider themselves such, or would be considered as such according to Halacha.

There is currently great thirst among young Jews for their religious birthright, that was denied of the past two generations, Futó noted. "The Holocaust and following socialism erased the Jewish tradition, but after the change of regime Jewish agencies were allowed entry, " he said. "My grandfather attended a Jewish school, but my parents didn't have that opportunity. In today's free world, we can travel to Israel and learn about our Jewish heritage and culture," he said.

"This is a reversed situation of the Jewish directive 'you shall teach your sons' - in our case, it is the sons who are providing the parents with the information on Judaism,” Futó added.

Besides facilitating the efforts with the authorities on regaining the building and the developmental work, Futó and his Israeli wife Shiran also donated a Torah scroll to the new synagogue, "to the reborn community, in the hope of understanding and acceptance, in the memory of our grandparents who lived through inhumanity,” as the embroidery on scroll's cover says.

Not only members of the Jewish community see great significance in the restoration of the synagogue.

"The renaissance of religious values is important to us, we are after all a conservative moderate right-wing party,” Hungarian Deputy Prime Minister Zsolt Semjén told the Post shorty before Sunday's ceremony. "But the renewal of this synagogue is particularly heart-warming for two reasons. First, after the communist regime, that used holy sites as warehouses, prayers can once again be offered from here. The other reason lies in the fact that under the socialist regime, Hungarian Jews were forced into one community. This synagogue enables the Jewish community its due multifariousness. It is not the role of the Hungarian government to decide for the Jews in which synagogue they should pray,” he added.

Of the major Jewish communities in Hungary, the Neolog Judaism movement, currently the largest and equatable to the Conservative movement

No comments:

Post a Comment