BUDAPEST, HUNGARY — Inside the Siraly coffeehouse in Budapest's Seventh District, the air is smoky and the tables are crowded with the young, cool and Jewish.
They are sipping creamed coffees and Hungarian merlots, chatting about theater and planning for a Hanukkah that will include music from jazz jams to klezmer and a menorah made from recycled materials. Another evening might feature Hebrew hip-hop, a spirited debate with some of the country's leading intellectuals. Or an Iranian film.
This is the heart of an unconventional revival of Jewish life that is injecting eclectic energy into the largest Jewish community between Paris and Moscow. With the horrors of the Holocaust and the atheistic sterility of communism now part of a distant past, a new generation of Hungarian Jews is embracing and recasting its Jewish identity, asking questions and posing answers while asserting diversity. Some are teaching their communist-era parents to be believers.
Despite assertions that Jewish communities in Europe are dead or dying, depleted by immigration and drowned by persistent waves of anti-Semitism, Budapest is home to at least 100,000 Jews.
More Jews survived World War II and stuck around in Hungary than in the rest of Central Europe. Today, the Hungarian capital has bustling synagogues, including the world's second largest; Jewish schools; Jewish publications; websites and blogs. There has been an explosion in cafes, restaurants and bookstores in the so-called Jewish Triangle, the historic Jewish neighborhoods of the city's central Seventh District that is undergoing something of a renaissance. There are older Orthodox Jews, middle-aged Neologue Jews (a branch of Judaism indigenous to Hungary) and thousands of secular Jews of all ages.
Finding tradition
Many have been experiencing the rediscovery of faith typical in the former Soviet bloc. Others are creating alternative ways of pursuing, if not the faith, at least some of the traditions and meanings of being a Jew. And they chafe at the staid bureaucracy that has managed formal Jewish affairs in Hungary for years.
"We want to focus on the traditions to re-create a new identity, a new concept of Jewish identity," said Eszter Susan, 29, one of the people running Siraly. (The coffeehouse's name means sea gull in Hungarian.)
"We are Jewish and it's nothing to hide," she said, speaking over the noise that bounced off walls covered with posters and abstract paintings.
