A Wake-Up Call, A Very Jewish Day

The day started with a Jewish walking tour around the former ghetto, now quite a trendy neighborhood, with a fabulously spirited guide named Agi. 

Hungarian Jews have a funky history. A generation wiped out by the Holocaust, their children survivors rejecting and forgetting the faith, their children curious to reclaim it, and the fourth generation finding our religion complicated, and distant but trendy. The community here, about 100,000 strong (more like 10,000 vaguely active, though), has the world’s second-largest synagogue, a Chabad house, a JCC, and a sleepaway camp my sister went to called Szarvas.

To stand next to a massive and beautiful synagogue and then realize there is a mass gravesite where 2000 of your ancestral community are buried in that shul’s courtyard is a pretty jarring experience. I had not visited Eastern Europe before, and my direct lineage may not be Hungarian, but for the first time, I felt close to a home and a history that sounded like my family’s. Explaining the level of overwhelm that comes with realizing 2000 people – your entire class in college, for a frame of reference – is buried beside you – because they did absolutely nothing to deserve to be starved or shot – either way, murdered…. That’s rough stuff.

So, I’ll move to the lighter stuff – as we stood around the corner at a memorial to righteous gentiles (about the third memorial in three blocks – this country LOVES statues), I noticed a familiar guy walking toward the group. R. Michael Paley happened to walk right through our group – he’s in Budapest hosting a local community seder, but why was the name so familiar? I don’t keep a rolodex of rabbis, but maybe I should. It dawned on me that he had been the scholar-in-residence at my summer internship at UJA-Federation of NY – Jewish Geography for the win. Just in time, I was able to reintroduce myself and he claimed I did definitely look familiar, made a kiss towards the heavens at the mention of his intern Noam Mintz, and our paths diverged once again.

Next, came food shopping at the kosher place – hardly what one could call a grocery store, and potentially a temporary establishment for pesach save the few covered cabinets filled with gluten goods. I was able to snag a box of matzah and a few matzah ball soup mixes. Later on, the trip leaders came back to stock up on seder ingredients (more matzah, plus chocolate, wine and macaroons) for our second night which we planned to create inside of our hip hostel.

We had a leisurely lunch which led into free time. A group of the trip’s senior girls plus staff member stumbled upon a fairly epic architectural. Thanks to my handy-dandy TripAdvisor phone app, I was able to inform the crew that this was in fact a St. Stephen’s Basilica built in the late 19^th century and yes, we should go in. There’s a picture, but just shiny gold everywhere, incredible marble, and an alleged relic hand from 1038. That’s a one thousand year old HAND. Ew. Typical church stuff completed, we headed to a cute café and warmed up over three desserts. It had begun to snow – not exactly the Punta Cana spring break my peers seemed to be enjoying most thoroughly.

That evening, we went to maariv, the ten-minute evening service at the Great Synagogue. A neo-logue place, there’s kind of a mechitzah and definitely an organ plus maybe a choir at this palatial house of worship. No prayer books were to be found, so I used my proficient Hungrilish Sign Language to communicate with a local over the pseudomechitzah party lines to get him to send some readers over to my troops. I even attempted to ask in Hebrew, but those language skills proved invalid with this guy also. Needless to say, I was confused, and by the time I got the books and found our place in the service, my silent Amidah prayer was cut a bit short and the whole service was over.

The rest of the night was arguably the most bizarre seder anyone has ever been to, so it will have its own blog. Let’s just call it ‘awesome’ and 'unexpected' for now. That night alone was reason to travel halfway across the world on senior spring break to a land of slush and snow.