The tables at Macesz Huszar were packed on a recent snowy afternoon in Budapest. The two-month-old restaurant’s hip clientele looked like the usual foodie elite, whipping out smartphones to photograph their meals. But it wasn’t culinary innovation that was drawing the crowds; it was the humble matzo-ball soup. A Jewish (but not kosher) bistro, Macesz Huszar offers delicious proof of the renaissance of Hungary’s once vibrant Jewish culture, which was nearly destroyed by the Holocaust and the communist era that followed. Yet as one table happily tucked into plates of goose-skin cracklings and an egg-and-duck-liver salad known as Jewish egg, the conversation focused not on the country’s Jewish revival but on whether Hungary was once again becoming hostile to Jews.
It might seem like an odd question. Budapest has Central Europe’s largest population of Jews, an estimated 100,000, with dozens of synagogues, prayer houses, art galleries, wine bars and community centers. Yet thanks to a declining economy and growing anti-Semitism, more and more Jews are either leaving Hungary or considering it. The number of those who have actually emigrated is still relatively small–an estimated 1,000 over the past year, according to the Federation of Jewish Communities in Hungary, known as Mazsihisz–but in Facebook forums, at synagogues and over casual dinners at Jewish bistros, the question looms large. “You look around at your friends,” says Dani, a 36-year-old architect who requested that his last name not be used, “and they’re all asking, Is it time to go?”
They have reason to wonder. In June, Budapest’s retired chief rabbi, Jozsef Schweitzer, was accosted by a man who said he “hates all Jews.” In October two men attacked Jewish leader Andras Kerenyi, kicking him in the stomach and shouting obscenities at him. When Kerenyi’s assailants were arrested, an online radio station praised the attack, calling it “a response to general Jewish terrorism.” In December, Balazs Lenhardt, an independent Member of Parliament, burned an Israeli flag in front of the Hungarian Foreign Ministry during an anti-Zionist protest–one in which participants shouted, “To Auschwitz with you all.” In the past several months, Jewish cemeteries have been vandalized, Holocaust monuments have been damaged, and swastikas have been painted on synagogue walls. On March 14, professors at Eotvos Lorand University in Budapest found stickers affixed to their office door that read, “Jews! The university belongs to us, not you! Regards, the Hungarian students.”
Isolated anti-Jewish events occur occasionally throughout Europe, but the frequency of these incidents in Hungary has accompanied a measurable darkening of public opinion. Andras Kovacs, a sociologist at Budapest’s Central European University, found that from 1992 to 2006, levels of anti-Semitism in Hungary remained relatively stable. About 10% of adults qualified as fervent anti-Semites, another 15% had some anti-Semitic feelings, and 60% of the population was not anti-Semitic at all. But beginning in 2006, when Hungary’s economy began to deteriorate and far-right parties began to rise, the intolerance started to intensify. By 2010 the percentage of those who qualified as fervent anti-Semites had risen to as high as 20%, and the percentage who said they held no anti-Jewish feelings had dropped to 50%.
Hungary’s history of anti-Semitism is long and sadly not that unusual–especially among other Central and East European countries. Even before it joined with Nazi Germany in World War II, Hungary established a quota limiting the number of Jews in certain professions. An estimated 560,000 of the country’s 800,000 Jews perished in the Holocaust, and another 20,000 left during the 1956 revolution. Under communism, public religious expression was banned and anti-Semitic sentiment dropped off, but it began rising again in 1990 after the regime fell.
For some scholars, that return was a reactionary response to the rapid economic and social changes that Hungary was experiencing; others argued that new civil liberties of the postcommunist era had simply made it possible to express old feelings. Jews are not the only victims of this new freedom of bigotry: the Roma community has also suffered from greatly increased persecution. Inevitably, politicians have harnessed public sentiment. “It has to do with the appearance of a new radical right in Hungarian politics,” says Kovacs. “They introduced anti-Semitism into politics, and that in turn made it O.K. for those who harbored anti-Jewish prejudices to express them publicly.”
The standard bearer of the radical right is Jobbik, or the Movement for a Better Hungary. The party won 16.7% of the vote in the 2010 national election, making it the third largest in Hungary. Though its strong showing was widely attributed to its anti-Roma platform, Jobbik’s members have made no secret of their anti-Jewish feelings. In one notorious incident in November, Jobbik MP Marton Gyongyosi–who has said he is concerned that Hungarian foreign policy unduly favors Israel–called for a survey of “how many people of Jewish origin there are in Hungary and in government who may represent a risk to national security.”
As outrage grew over his call for what the media quickly deemed a “list”–a term especially radioactive in a country where community lists were used during World War II to deport Jews to concentration camps–Gyongyosi backtracked, claiming that he had meant that only dual-nationality Hungarian Israelis in government should be identified. Yet in an interview with TIME in early February, he characterized a 2007 speech by Shimon Peres–in which the Israeli President noted that empires today could be founded “without settling colonies” and jokingly remarked that his fellow citizens were “buying up Manhattan, Hungary, Romania and Poland”–as evidence of Israel’s nefarious intentions. “[Peres] said that what you need to subjugate another people and colonize them is money and business,” said Gyongyosi. “It’s not conspiracy theory to say, I live in this country and I look around me and I see this kind of colonization.”
Ferenc Kumin, the Hungarian Deputy State Secretary for International Communication, argues that the government–led by the center-right party Fidesz–is doing everything it can to fight racism. The new constitution that was drafted under Prime Minister Viktor Orban includes a provision that makes it easier to prosecute hate speech. Another law has made Holocaust denial a crime. In response to Gyongyosi’s speech, Orban received Peter Feldmajer of Mazsihisz and spoke against prejudice. “I would like to make it clear that … we Hungarians will protect our Jewish compatriots,” said Orban.
Yet Orban’s response did not come until a week after Gyongyosi’s speech–though he sent a representative to an earlier protest–and at a Feb. 27 U.S. congressional hearing on anti-Semitism in Central Europe, former Hungarian government minister Tamas Fellegi admitted that the government had at times been “slow and ineffective in its statements and actions.” Many outside the government characterize Orban’s response to Jobbik’s rhetoric as tepid. “At the national level, Fidesz has taken serious steps to combat anti-Semitism,” says Feldmajer. “But at the local level, the municipal level, there’s often collaboration between Jobbik and Fidesz.” Feldmajer claims there are “anti-Semitic voices within Fidesz” that are sometimes indistinguishable from those within Jobbik. One of the most inflammatory of those voices is Zsolt Bayer, a virulently anti-Roma tabloid journalist who was one of the ruling party’s founders. After Andras Schiff, the famous London-based Hungarian pianist, wrote a letter to the Washington Post saying he would not return to Hungary because of its current political situation, Bayer wrote a newspaper column in which he referred to Schiff and a pair of foreign Jewish critics of the Hungarian government as “a stinking excrement called something like Cohen from somewhere in England.” Bayer, who remains close to Fidesz leaders, maintains that he was criticizing them for their political beliefs, not their religion.
Orban’s own nationalist rhetoric doesn’t help. In his efforts to revive Hungarian patriotism, his government has permitted towns to build statues of and name streets after Miklos Horthy, the regent of Hungary from 1920 to 1944. Horthy sought redress for the dismemberment of Hungary after World War I but also collaborated with Hitler–if unwillingly at times–and was in power during the deportation of much of Hungary’s Jewish population. Orban’s Education Ministry also introduced Hungarian authors like Jozsef Nyiro–who was a member of the World War II–era fascist Arrow Cross Party and whose works include anti-Semitic themes–into school curriculums. Kumin responds that authors like Nyiro are being taught for their literary value, not their politics. Yet Imre Kertesz, who won Hungary’s only Nobel Prize for Literature, was removed from the curriculums’ classification of “Hungarian authors.” (Kertesz, who lives in Berlin, is Jewish.) Some critics also see subtle attacks in Orban’s efforts to reduce the influence of foreign banks on the Hungarian economy and of liberal dissenters in the Hungarian media. “[He] knows how to speak in codes that tap into certain stereotypes,” says Magdalena Marsovszky, a visiting lecturer at Germany’s Fulda University of Applied Sciences. “Cosmopolitan, foreign, liberal–these can be code words for Jews.”
Orban’s critics stop well short of accusing him of anti-Semitism. But the electoral politics of a changing, more conservative Hungary may have made him more willing to tolerate it in others. “Fidesz feels that Jobbik is its biggest threat,” says Peter Kreko, director at the Budapest-based Political Capital Institute. “They don’t have the same approach, but [Fidesz] leaves enough gaps to let the voters believe what they want.” And that can create a trickle-down effect. “When you can hear politicians saying this kind of thing in parliament or journalists saying it in the media,” says Josef Horvath, president of Bet Shalom synagogue, “then ordinary people start to think there’s nothing wrong in complaining about ‘dirty Jews’ when they’re at the supermarket.” As a result, many Jews think it prudent to conceal their identity in public. “People hide their kippahs beneath baseball hats now,” says Zoltan Radnoti, rabbi for the same synagogue. “Some people don’t even want to friend me [on Facebook]. They say, ‘Rabbi, please, I don’t want people at work to know I’m Jewish.'”
This fear is erupting precisely at a moment when Jewish culture is flourishing in Budapest. Jewish educator and author Linda Vero-Ban began working to revive the city’s dormant Jewish culture in the early 1990s, when she was just a teenager. “You couldn’t practice your religion under communism, so it wasn’t until after the regime fell that people began trying to recover their identity,” she says. “They don’t go to synagogue, but they still want to express their Jewish culture.” For Hungarians who have only recently learned that their parents or grandparents were Jewish, secular places like the Macesz Huszar bistro can be an appealing way to connect with their heritage. “What’s the easiest way to feel Jewish?” asks the restaurant’s owner, David Popovits. “Eat some matzo-ball soup.”
And yet even people like Vero-Ban, who is married to Rabbi Tamas Vero and loves Budapest, is wondering whether it is time to leave. About two years ago, her husband took their two young daughters out shopping. As he knelt on the floor to help his girls try on shoes, a passerby spied the rabbi’s kippah and began shouting slurs at him while onlookers did nothing. If the family hasn’t emigrated yet, it’s because Vero feels a responsibility to his community. Still, the question figured prominently in the rabbi’s Rosh Hashanah sermon last year. “I wonder if we are brave enough to face the unknown now,” Vero said. “Or if, in a few centuries, our descendants will ask, Why did the Jews not return to the Holy Land in the 21st century? Did they not learn from history?”
The number of Hungarian Jews who have immigrated to Israel is small–170 last year–and many leave for economic reasons as well as political. Unemployment is 11.2% in Hungary, and in 2012, its GDP contracted by 1.7%. But even those who can easily find a job are wondering where their line in the sand should be. Not long ago, Dani the architect and his wife Eszter were on a crowded city bus with a man who was yelling into his cell phone about a “‘dirty Jew who wouldn’t give me back my money.’ The first time you hear something like that, you’re really shocked,” Eszter recalls. “The second time, you’re just shocked. And the third time, it starts to seem normal.” The two have seriously considered leaving–Dani has sent out his portfolio to a number of foreign companies–but so far, the desire to remain close to their family has kept them in Hungary. “I still believe those things can’t happen again,” Dani says, referring to the Holocaust. “But maybe we’re kidding ourselves. You know the saying about how you cook a frog not by dropping him in boiling water–he jumps out–but by putting him in cold water and slowly turning up the heat? Maybe we’re the frogs.”
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