A Chosen Few - Mark Kurlansky [168]
AFTER THE WAR the Budapest Jewish Community leadership, the MIOK, had estimated that there were 240,000 Jews left in Hungary. About 150,000 fled following the 1956 uprising. For years the estimate of the Jewish population ran between 80,000 and 100,000. But this had always been a guess. Only about 10,000 Jews were registered members of the Jewish Community. After the change in regimes, in spite of nationalists and neo-Nazis, the number of acknowledged Jews steadily increased. By 1993, the common figure was 120,000 Jews. Budapest had three Jewish schools, and the Community was growing more active and more diverse.
One of the first things to be done was to remove the old leader-ship. Ilona Seifert was asked to leave the MIOK. Some Jews, especially younger ones, were bitter about her stewardship of the Community, and this judgment angered her. In her mind she and her husband had done what had to be done to keep the Community operating. “It was written what we had to do, and we were allowed all the elements of Jewish life. It's not true that you couldn't do what you wanted. Unless it was Zionist. That was very strict, and sometimes they thought things were Zionist and they weren't. But that didn't come from Hungary, it was from Russia. Because they didn't know what a Zionist movement was. Young people would try to do something and they would think it was Zionist.”
But what those young people remembered was that the Community had not stood up for them, had obstructed rather than helped them in their efforts.
THE LIPPNERS, even though they did not want to be party members after 1956, raised their two sons to do the things that would insure them a career. Being Jewish was dangerous. You could know you were Jewish, but you didn't talk about it. Like the overwhelming majority of Hungarian youth, the Lippner boys belonged to the Federation of Communist Youth. George excelled in mathematics, coming in fourth in the national competition, and went to a technical university and became a mathematician. It really didn't matter that he was Jewish, as long as he didn't do anything about it.
George married a Jew of a similar background. Her parents had drawn one conclusion from the Holocaust—either there was no God, or God was not watching. It was inconceivable that God had intended this fate for Jews. Either way, nobody was looking after Jews, and so it was better to be quiet about being Jewish. George and his wife had two children and raised them, like themselves, without Jewish education. After the regime changed in 1989, George took a job in a Florida community college.
He read newspapers, trying to keep up with the changes in their country, but still, when a new Jewish school in Budapest asked him to be principal, the job offer came as a surprise. Lippner didn't think there would be any interest in a Jewish school in Budapest. There had been one Jewish high school for years, the Anne Frank School, which was not even allowed to teach modern Hebrew because it was considered a Zionist language. No one who wanted to go to university and have a successful career went to the Anne Frank School.
The new school was supported by the Lauder Foundation, but Lippner found it hard to believe it would attract enough good students to survive. Nevertheless, he decided