Jewish Budapest: Monuments, Rites, History

by Kinga Frojimovics (Editor), Géza Komoróczy (Editor), Viktoria Pusztai (Editor)

Neither a guide or a history in the narrow sense, presents the Jewish face of Budapest from medieval times to the present.

612 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1995

Reviews

[Jindřich Zapletal · Rating 5 out of 5]

Plenty of biographies of highly interesting characters, an emphasis on architecture and spatial dimensions of the Jewish community, a detailed treatment of 19th century and a highly dramatic account of the Catastrophe Era. The book spends zero time on theorizing; it is all about concrete circumstances and concrete people, and there is an enormous amount of fruitful fodder for your search engine. As numerous neighborhoods and single buildings are treated in detail, the reader gets also an informative complement to a tourist guide to Budapest. A great book.

[Cyndi · Rating 4 out of 5]

I am looking forward to reading this book because it covers history my family lived through. The focus is on the time before (by a 100 years of so) and during WWII. Some of my family (like my mom and her parents) left for the US in 1939, but others weren't able to get out (like my great aunt and her family). My great uncle was the chief Rabbi of Budapest before and during the war and the book references him several times and now I even have a picture of him! This is a huge book (can't carry it with me places to read easily) ordered from interlibrary loan, but I already wish I had my own copy.

Have read it now and there is so much in there. Less about my uncle than I had hoped, but it's obvious the author used his work (there are like a dozen entries from him in the bibliography...he wrote about Jewish history). It really is very comprehensive and covers just about everything I can think of to cover. Well except for the period between 1947 and 1956 (strict Communist control over country).

Turns out my uncle's picture comes from a book about the synagogue from another chief Rabbi, so that's going to be on my to-get list for sure (though I think it's just in Hungarian).