Like many Hungarian Jews of her generation, she grew up with a vague notion she was Jewish, though not really what that meant.
Adam Schoenberger, who opened the rambling, three-story Siraly last year, said he was casting about for "points of access" for young Jews who, like him, found synagogues with aging congregations to be less than inviting.
"We are trying to change things," said Schoenberger, a wiry man of 27. "We are asking the questions: Who is a Jew and what does that mean?
"We are here. We are alive. We are cool."
Similar motivation led blogger Bruno Bitter, 31, to found the wildly popular website and social network known as judapest.org. He took the name from an anti-Semitic reference made by a Viennese mayor a century ago, turned it on its head and converted it into something positive, he says.
"I wanted to change the rules and the context of being Jewish in Hungary," Bitter said by e-mail. "I wanted to take 'Jewishness' out of all its negative contexts (like anti-Semitism, the Holocaust or the Middle East conflict)."
A key reason the Jewish community in Budapest has the luxury to flourish and experiment is sheer numbers, said Edward Serotta, head of the Vienna-based Central Europe Center for Research and Documentation, which is collecting the history of Jewish life in Europe from the last century.
Jews were exterminated throughout the Hungarian countryside in World War II, but many were spared in Budapest, faring better than in most neighboring countries. And Hungarian communism was less repressive than in other places, allowing the Soviet bloc's only rabbinical seminary to operate.
But only after the fall of communism in 1989 did many Hungarian Jews begin to return to their faith, a process often led by the young.
At their second-floor walk-up in the Seventh District, four generations of the Sardi family come together on a Friday evening for Shabbat dinner and the lighting of candles.
Renewed faith
Dora Sardi, 33, a historian, has reinvigorated faithful observance in the family. Her grandfather, a Holocaust survivor, felt it necessary to repress his faith; his son, Dora's father, wanted nothing to do with religion. It was an era when many Hungarian Jews changed their last names, stopped speaking Yiddish, dropped holidays.
"My mother was educated by her grandmother, so she knew a little more about the traditions. But my father didn't want to hear about it," Dora Sardi said. "We celebrated Christmas for a few years, and then nothing at all for several years.
