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knew, and it felt too conservative for them. Then they met an English couple at the rabbinical seminary. The English couple had noticed that there were a number of young people at the Kiddush who seemed uncomfortable and out of place. “And this/’ as Gardos said, “is how we met other young Jews from the big world outside.” For the first time in his life he was now free to have contacts in other countries. He and his wife went to England, and they made a discovery that greatly surprised them—“Other young people consider themselves Jews, and they don't live in Israel and they are not even Orthodox!” It was a new kind of Jew to him. Until the trip to England he had thought he had three options: He could move to Israel or he could stay in Hungary; if he stayed in Hungary, he could attend a Neologue synagogue, which to his mind was Orthodox; or he could not be Jewish. In London, he and Kati discovered liberal Judaism, where the synagogue had Western music rather than traditional chanting and where women were called up to read Torah. They were astonished to find a Judaism that corresponded to the ideas of women's equality that had been a part of their Communist upbringing. And they were not made to feel inadequate because of their ignorance of Hebrew and customs.

Kati and Zoltan decided to bring this new kind of Judaism to Budapest. They would start an entirely new community of liberal Judaism. As a woman, Kati would not be allowed to attend the rabbinical seminary in Budapest but would have to go back to England and study. She would either become a full rabbi or at least study for a year to become a religious leader.

They began by holding Havdalah services, the pretty little ceremony that ends the Sabbath. After the short service they had study sessions. But the official Community was not happy. The rabbinate declared that nothing liberal would be accepted, and it barred the liberals from establishing a formal Community of their own. In the official Community's statement, it declared that liberal Judaism led to assimilation. Hungary had experience with assimilation before the war, and what happened to all those assimilated Jews? The Holocaust had proven that assimilation does not work, the Community argued. They could never be “true Hungarians.”

GYULA GAZDAG left Hungary in spring 1989 to teach film at UCLA. There he got Hungarian newspapers and read about his friends, marginalized rebels, many of whom were now deputies in parliament. The film institute had thrown out the old bureaucracy that had been censoring them. It wrote to Gyula and asked him to come back and head the film department. In May 1991 he returned to what seemed like a different country. But in the new Hungary Gyula found a different obstacle to his film work. The state, in the process of denationalizing everything from manufacturing to pastry shops, also wanted to stop funding films. That meant Hungarian filmmakers would have to get financing from other sources, of which there were few in Hungary. Foreign financing was also difficult because Hungary was a small country with a small local market and a language no one else understood. In the future Hungarian films would have to have some kind of foreign appeal to attract foreign investors, or they just wouldn't get made.

Though Laszlo Herzog saw a trend toward more religious education for Jews in Hungary, neither Gyula Gazdag nor George Lippner gave religious training to their children, even though they both had Jewish wives. “They are aware of the fact that they are Jewish,” said Gyula. “But it is not natural for me to deal with religion.”

George Lippner felt the same way. His two children did not attend the Jewish school where he was principal. Still, he did not give them the same upbringing that his parents gave him: He did not want to teach them that it was dangerous to be Jewish and something to keep to themselves. “I tell them that if you are a Jew, you cannot avoid being a Jew. If somebody else wants to pick on you or say something rude because you are a Jew, he will not ask you whether you think you