Tag: Budapest

Police in Budapest have arrested two young men after they allegedly assaulted the leader of a Jewish congregation.

A Hungarian lawyer has urged authorities to charge Nazi hunter Efraim Zuroff with making “false statements” against an alleged war criminal. Attorney Futo Barnabas said...

"I felt here that I was at home," remarks Agnes Keleti about her arrival in Israel in 1957. An Israeli emissary had invited this leading Hungarian Jewish female athlete to participate in the fifth Maccabiah Games that year, and that’s when she discovered that Israel was “home.”

He was having trouble getting up from the platform and into the cattle car. After all, he was only twelve years old and there was no ramp leading inside. An SS thug saw him “dawdling” in front of the car and aimed a boot at the boy’s posterior. The boy jumped out of the way just in time and the SS man fell to his face from the violence of his own kick.

A whistle-blowing Budapest rabbi was questioned by police for what has been described as misuse of sensitive private information stemming from a personal conflict...

A celebration of the 100th birthday of Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat who saved the lives of over 20,000 Hungarian Jews in the final days of World War II, also marks the renewal of investigations into the events surrounding his death. In attendance - the Iranian Ambassador to Hungary

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For the past month I've been on the road, crossing continents and addressing Jewish communities wherever they are. I go from the airport to the local synagogue or some other venue where people gather. Invariably I am asked, "Rebbetzin, how do you do it? People younger than you cannot keep up with such a schedule. Travel is so difficult. Don't you find it exhausting?"

It is not often we find a Holocaust memoir where the author contributed to the saving of the saintly Bobover Rebbe, Shlomo Halberstam, met the infamous and controversial Kasztner and faced the devil Eichmann. Furthermore, she encountered gentiles that helped or contributed to her and her husband's survival; from the Polish mayor of Niepolomice, the Nazi commander of the Bochnia ghetto, Polish expatriates in Budapest, a Hungarian janitor in Debrecen to a Hungarian doctor in Budapest.

It is not often we find a Holocaust memoir where the author contributed to the saving of the saintly Bobover Rebbe, Shlomo Halberstam, met the infamous and controversial Kasztner and faced the devil Eichmann. Furthermore, she encountered gentiles that helped or contributed to her and her husband's survival; from the Polish mayor of Niepolomice, the Nazi commander of the Bochnia ghetto, Polish expatriates in Budapest, a Hungarian janitor in Debrecen to a Hungarian doctor in Budapest.

In the summer of 1993, shortly before I was to participate in an international conference on the concept of the hero in Jewish history, I began researching how Israeli society had perpetuated the memory of the Yishuv (Jewish community in pre-state Israel) parachutists from World War II.

Once again, I am on a plane. I am returning to New York after a long, two- week journey. It has been a grueling, but exhilarating tour. Each day, I addressed the Jewish community of another European country. The first stop was Paris. I was forewarned that in Europe if you draw an audience of 100-200 people, you could regard yourself successful, so my expectations were not very high. But when I arrived at the huge synagogue it was crowded wall-to-wall. There wasn't a seat to be had, and people were still coming, not only residents of Paris, but from as far away as Strasbourg.

At first glance it looks like an ordinary brownstone.

I am interrupting the sequence of my articles to share with you some of my experiences in Europe. During the past few days, I have had the privilege of addressing the members of the Jewish communities of Amsterdam, Budapest, Berlin and London. While each community has its own unique character, there is a common denominator that connects them all, and that is the "pintele Yid," that spark from Sinai that HaShem engraved on the heart of every Jew, which, if ignited, can become a glorious flame of Torah.

''We are three blocks away; you will be home in a minute.''
The taxi driver nudges me rudely into semi-consciousness. I try
to shake the fog from my head. I am still half asleep, staring
through the window at the Christmas lights. As consciousness
slowly seeps through, something here is out of place. Why is there
a giant Christmas tree on display in Budapest when it is months
after Christmas? I shake my head some more. No, it is not
Budapest. I left Budapest six hours ago and have been flying all
night. I must have succumbed to exhaustion on the ride up to
Haifa in the taxi from the airport.