A Chosen Few - Mark Kurlansky [169]
One incentive for a Jewish school was the growing movement to offer some kind of religious program in the Hungarian school system, which inevitably would be Christian. Jews were to be given the right to excuse themselves, thereby stating to bigots that they were not “true Hungarians” and would not fully participate in the “Hungarian” curriculum.
Even a third Jewish school sprang up in Budapest. Sponsored by the Joint and a Canadian financier, it served the Orthodox community. Laszlo Herzog, general secretary of the Orthodox community, said, “If anybody told me ten years ago that I would see a Jewish school with five hundred students—” It was particularly surprising since membership in the Orthodox community, adults and children, had hovered for many years at about 1,000 people.
Herzog s father had been head of the Orthodox community in Ujpest. His wife and two children were killed at Auschwitz. After the war the Orthodox rabbinate arranged marriages for those who had lost their families, and since his wife and two children had been killed at Auschwitz, he was matched with a woman who had also lost two children and a husband at Auschwitz.
Their son, Laszlo, was one of the few Hungarian Jews of the postwar generation who stayed in Hungary and grew up in a traditional Jewish life. Orthodox children were given special permission to observe the Sabbath. Laszlo went to a small Jewish school in one oi the old dark buildings in the Jewish section of Pest, the rundown neighborhood where the ghetto had been. His family managed to eat kosher, although it meant an extremely limited diet since not many kosher products were available. This Jewish life came at a price. Children like Laszlo Herzog grew up knowing that they simply had no future in Hungary. All of Herzog's forty classmates left the country in the 1960s. Laszlo also intended to leave, but at the age of 17 his father died, leaving only him to look after his ailing mother. He naively dreamed of becoming a doctor, but coming out of a Jewish school, he was not admitted to a university. Later, he was able to go to London and receive the medical training to become a mohel.
Whenever he was outside, Herzog's yarmulke was always discreetly covered by a hat. But although his dress was not Hasidic, he looked clearly like an Orthodox Jew. He had short blond hair and was clean-shaven and serious-looking, with his wire-rimmed glasses. What no one knew about him, unless they were one of the few who went to services in the small, soiled, shop-worn synagogue on Dessewffy Street—a plain room whose only architectural detail was a painted design on the peeling walls—was that he had a rich lyric tenor voice.
After the Communists fell from power, Herzog, who had always circumcised the few male babies born into the Orthodox community, was suddenly in demand for the circumcision of teenage boys. They would decide to be bar mitzvahed and would learn that they were supposed to be circumcised and the family would ask Herzog to do it. But in the course of interviewing the family, it often became clear that the boy was not really Jewish. In most of these cases the father but not the mother was Jewish. Herzog turned down an average of twenty circumcisions a year for boys who he found were not Jews.
ASIDE FROM this little Orthodox group, Budapest Jewry belonged to the Neologue movement, a Hungarian variation that, like the American conservative movement, was fairly traditional with some liberal tendencies. Neologue was all Zoltan Gardos and Kati Kele-rnen