Young Hungarian Jews embrace, recast identities

"Slowly, slowly, we are finding the way back."

Her father, Gyula Sardi, 60, said he always knew he was a Jew, "but it was a kind of secret."

Wearing an oversized white-silk yarmulke, Gyula found it somewhat amusing that it is his daughter now teaching him how to worship.

"To have this from your children is unusual," he said. "Usually the parents give religion to the child, not the other way around. We inherited it from our children."

The patriarch, 94-year-old Fulop Sardi, was condemned to a wartime forced-labor brigade, a fate shared by tens of thousands of male Hungarian Jews, but he survived. Fulop Sardi, who changed his name from Steiner in 1946, only began talking about the Holocaust in the last 10 to 15 years

His eyes twinkle at the Shabbat ceremony, especially as he watches his great-grandchildren gather around silver candlesticks for the blessing.

"I am more active now than as a youth," he said. "And it is even better now, because where it used to be an obligation, now it is a pleasure."

The traditions have jumped generations: Dora's grandfather had a bris and bar mitzvah, but neither her father nor her brother did; her 7-year-old son had a bris, is studying Torah and will have a bar mitzvah.

Dora's husband, Mate Gaspar, is more pessimistic about the revival of Jewish life here.

"It's too late," Gaspar, a theatrical director, said. "The roots are not there anymore; it's lost its context."

He also believes anti-Semitism is ingrained in so many Hungarians, with the history of the Holocaust still not confronted, that Jews can once again become scapegoats in any disaster or national misfortune. "If they look for an enemy, they will say 'the Jews,' " he said. "The reflex is still there."

For many young Jews, rediscovering their faith has been helped along by a visit to Israel, though, significantly, not a decision to remain there. Schoenberger, the Siraly manager, said he enjoyed living in Israel but he felt he belonged in Hungary. "The best thing I can do is live in Hungary with my full identity," he said. "I can be a whole person here. I don't have to go to another country" to live a Jewish life.

Some question, however, whether a Jewish identity based on cultural and intellectual pursuits, and not on religion, isn't hollow. Is it sustainable in the long term?

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