The Jews of Budapest

The Jewish community of Budapest was the largest Jewish community in central Europe outside the Soviet Union. The 1941 census recorded 184,453 Jews in the city, around 23 per cent of Budapest’s population and the highest urban concentration of Jews anywhere in Europe. Of all the major Jewish communities subjected to German deportation, Budapest was the latest, the most rapid, and, paradoxically, the most-survived. Around 100,000 Budapest Jews were murdered between May 1944 and February 1945. Around 80,000 survived. The community remains the largest in central Europe in 2026.

The community before 1944

Budapest’s Jewish community was the product of nineteenth-century Hungarian emancipation. The 1867 Compromise that established the Austro-Hungarian dual monarchy granted Jews full civil rights; the Hungarian government from then until the First World War actively encouraged Jewish integration as a way of building the Magyar urban population against the rising tide of nationalisms in the multi-ethnic empire. Hungarian Jews, almost uniquely in central Europe, took the offer; they assimilated linguistically into Magyar, supported the Hungarian state in successive nationality conflicts, and produced an integrated middle class that dominated the Budapest professions, banking, journalism and culture by 1900.

The Dohány Street Synagogue, completed in 1859 and seating 3,000, is the largest synagogue in Europe and the second largest in the world. Its Moorish-revival facade and twin onion-domed towers became one of the visual symbols of Budapest. Beside it stands the smaller Kazinczy Street Synagogue serving the Orthodox community, completed in 1913. The Rabbinical Seminary of Budapest, founded in 1877, was the leading institution of Hungarian Jewish religious education and one of the most important rabbinical institutions in central Europe.

The community produced a cultural and intellectual contribution to twentieth-century life that outran its size. Theodor Herzl, the founder of political Zionism, was born in Budapest in 1860 in a house adjoining the Dohány Street Synagogue. The mathematicians John von Neumann, Paul Erdős and George Pólya were Budapest Jews; the physicists Leo Szilard, Eugene Wigner and Edward Teller were Budapest Jews; the photographers Robert Capa, André Kertész and Brassaï were Budapest Jews. The composer Béla Bartók was not Jewish, but the Budapest musical world that supported him was substantially Jewish, including his publisher Sándor Jemnitz and his great pupil Antal Doráti.

The interwar period

The period after the First World War was less hospitable. The 1919 Soviet Republic of Hungary led by Béla Kun, himself of Jewish origin, was followed by the right-wing regime of Admiral Miklós Horthy, which adopted the numerus clausus law of 1920 restricting Jewish admissions to the universities. The 1938 and 1939 Jewish Laws, passed under increasing German pressure, restricted Jewish participation in the professions, in commerce and in cultural life. The 1941 Third Jewish Law adopted the Nuremberg racial definition. By 1941 the legal position of Hungarian Jews resembled that of German Jews in 1935 to 1937.

The murders, however, came late. Hungary, although allied with Germany from 1940, refused German demands to deport its Jews until 1944. Hungarian Jews were pressed into forced labour battalions attached to the army, in which around 40,000 died on the Eastern Front, but the bulk of Hungarian Jewry remained in their homes through the years when the rest of European Jewry was being murdered. The Hungarian government’s calculation was the calculation of an unwilling ally: too compliant to break with Germany, too reluctant to deliver its Jews until forced.

1944: the deportation

The German occupation of Hungary on 19 March 1944 ended the anomaly. Adolf Eichmann arrived in Budapest within days with his deportation team and began work immediately. The Hungarian government under Döme Sztójay, installed by the Germans, cooperated fully. The provincial Hungarian Jewish communities (Kassa, Munkács, Ungvár, Debrecen, Szeged, Kolozsvár, and many smaller towns) were ghettoised in April and May and deported to Auschwitz between 15 May and 9 July 1944. Some 437,000 provincial Hungarian Jews were sent in fewer than eight weeks. The Auschwitz crematoria were operating at capacity throughout this period; the Sonderkommando revolt of October 1944 took place against the background of the Hungarian transports.

The Budapest community was the last to be processed. The plan had been to deport the city’s Jews in July and August. International pressure, including the Vrba-Wetzler report describing Auschwitz that had reached the Allies in June, the Allied bombing of Budapest in early July, the diplomatic interventions of King Gustav of Sweden, the Pope, the Red Cross and the United States, persuaded Horthy to halt the deportations on 9 July 1944. The Budapest deportations did not resume.

What followed was different. The Arrow Cross, the Hungarian fascist movement, took power in a German-backed coup on 15 October 1944. The Arrow Cross militias began a campaign of murder in Budapest itself. Jews were shot on the banks of the Danube, the bodies pushed into the river. A ghetto was established in the central seventh district around the Dohány Street Synagogue and packed with 70,000 Jews; conditions in the ghetto deteriorated rapidly through the winter. Forced marches west towards the Austrian border took thousands more.

The interventions of foreign diplomats saved tens of thousands of Budapest Jews. Raoul Wallenberg of the Swedish embassy issued protective passports and rented “safe houses” under Swedish flag. Carl Lutz of the Swiss embassy did the same. Giorgio Perlasca, an Italian businessman pretending to be the Spanish chargé d’affaires after the actual Spanish diplomat fled, ran a parallel rescue operation. Angel Sanz Briz of the Spanish embassy, whose work Perlasca took over, had issued the original Spanish papers. The Apostolic Nuncio Angelo Rotta, the future Pope John XXIII, organised Vatican papers. The Soviet army reached Budapest on 18 January 1945; the Pest side of the city was liberated that day, the Buda side a month later. The community as it was found was largely the community that had been protected by foreign neutrality.

Afterwards

The post-war Hungarian Jewish community was rebuilt in Budapest. Forty years of communist rule kept the community small and inward-looking; emigration after 1990 reduced it further; but the core remained, and the Dohány Street Synagogue continues in active use. The Hungarian Jewish community in 2026 numbers around 75,000 to 100,000, depending on the count, almost all of it in Budapest. The community is the largest in central Europe and the largest east of the Rhine.

The Holocaust Memorial Center on Páva Street, opened in 2004, is the principal Hungarian Holocaust museum. The Shoes on the Danube Bank memorial, sixty pairs of cast-iron shoes installed on the Pest embankment in 2005, marks the site of the Arrow Cross shootings. The Dohány Street Synagogue’s courtyard contains the Raoul Wallenberg Memorial Park and the metal Tree of Life sculpture by Imre Varga, its leaves engraved with the names of Hungarian Jews who were murdered.

See also

Sources

  • Randolph L. Braham, The Politics of Genocide: The Holocaust in Hungary, Columbia University Press, 1981 (revised 1994 edition is standard)
  • Randolph L. Braham (ed), The Geographical Encyclopedia of the Holocaust in Hungary, Northwestern University Press, 2013
  • Christian Gerlach and Götz Aly, Das letzte Kapitel: Realpolitik, Ideologie und der Mord an den ungarischen Juden 1944-1945, Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 2002
  • László Karsai and Judit Molnár (eds), Documents on the Hungarian Holocaust, multiple volumes, various publishers
  • Tim Cole, Holocaust City: The Making of a Jewish Ghetto, Routledge, 2003
  • Paul A. Hanebrink, In Defense of Christian Hungary: Religion, Nationalism, and Antisemitism, 1890-1944, Cornell University Press, 2006
  • Yad Vashem, Hungarian community pages, https://www.yadvashem.org
  • Holocaust Memorial Center Budapest, https://hdke.hu