Hungary is my birthplace, and although I left it in 1956 at the age of 4, it still has strong associations for me. I speak Hungarian with my parents, and my wife also likes to speak it if she wants to tell me something the children shouldn't know (of course, the result of this is that the kids have picked up quite a few Hungarian phrases, and my 13 year old son understands a lot of what he hears.)
My growing interest in family history research has led me to do quite a bit of reading in Hungarian over the past couple of years. I have no formal schooling in Hungarian, but its spelling is completely phonetic (except for the many English words that have been added in recent years!) and so it is quite easy to read once one learns that some of the consonants have sounds that are quite different than in English. This reading has considerably expanded my Hungarian vocabulary, and I was quite pleased to notice on my recent trip that I could pass for a local. People I dealt with in shops, libraries etc. could not immediately detect that I did not live in Hungary. Of course, that may partly be because Hungary is no longer as homogeneous as it used to be, and it has taken in various immigrants. I noticed a number of people of oriental background in Budapest, speaking accented but quite passable Hungarian.
I was in Hungary from July 20 to 29, since I could not get away for longer, which was just barely enough for a quick tour of the places of interest to me.
Immediately upon landing in Budapest, I drove in my rented car to Kisvarda, the small city (more like an overgrown village) where my parents grew up. I took the southern route, Highway 4 via Debrecen, because it leads directly from the airport, and it is impossible to get lost. This is a well paved road, but it is a single lane most of the way. The transitional state of Hungary's economy shows up immediately on this road, because traffic is slowed down by ancient Soviet era trucks that putter along at 50 kilometers per hour, forcing drivers to frequently pass, a dangerous situation considering the volume of oncoming traffic. Even with considerable passing, the 300 kilometer drive to Kisvarda took me almost 5 hours.
Driving along, I felt like I was in a time warp, with the signs along the highway frequently proclaiming the distance to Ungvar, which is the end of this particular road. Ungvar, now Uzhgorod in the Ukraine, was one of the great Jewish centers of the Sub-Carpathian region. The Hungarian road signs continue to use its old name.
I said a heartfelt "shehehiyanuh" when I crossed the line into Szabolcs(-Szatmar-Bereg) county. It was a moment of great emotion for me, a feeling of "coming home." It is the great backwater of Hungary, with the country's highest unemployment rate (near 20 percent). My ancestors farmed its peculiar yellow soil for about 200 years (and maybe longer), and many of them are buried in it.
In Kisvarda, I had hoped to visit the local history resources at the library. (Believe it or not, the library has a website, and I had been in e-mail contact with the librarians.) Unfortunately, it was closed for the entire three days that I stayed in Kisvarda, even though the sign in the window indicated that it was supposed to be open. One of the librarians has just completed a book outlining the 250 year history of the Jewish community of Kisvarda, which at one time exceeded 25 percent of the town's population, and which is now close to nil.
I was able to buy this well-written book at the museum, which is housed in the former synagogue's building. It is remarkable that someone would go to the trouble of writing such a book for so limited a market. However, they seem to have a sense of nostalgia for the Jews who were such a major part of their town's history, and who are gone from them forever.
The book is entitled A Kisvardai Zsidosag Tortenete, by Istvan Nezo, published 1998 by Ardlea, (Nyiregyhaza, Pf. 167, H-4401). I paid only 1200 forints for it, a terrific deal for a 160 page hardcover book, but books are very cheap in Hungary (I suspect they are subsidized by the government). The author has referred to interesting historical sources, including the records of the Eszterhazy estate, which owned land in Kisvarda in the 1800s. From this, I learned that one of my ancestors, Farkas Spitz, is mentioned in the Eszterhazy archives as a tenant.
If someone from my family had visited Kisvarda in the 1930s, he or she would have found over a hundred relatives. My great-grandfather Elias Fischer had 12 siblings, and my grandfather had several dozen first cousins. The last remnant of this vast family in Kisvarda is the elderly widow of my mother's second cousin. A great many were killed in the Holocaust, and almost all of the survivors emigrated. I did have a nice visit with Laci, an old friend of my father's. They had been tailoring apprentices together in the 1930s, at a Jewish establishment named Rosenfeld's. Laci is not Jewish, but he picked up quite a bit of Yiddish there, which he still retains, and he was throwing phrases at me. He keeps up with several former Jewish residents of Kisvarda scattered all over the world, and he has a remarkable store of gossip about them.
The (former) synagogue is still the most impressive building in the whole town. As part of the museum display, there is a considerable number of Jewish artifacts. One room of the museum is a memorial to the Jews of Kisvarda who were deported in 1944, and were murdered at Auschwitz. Across the yard from the museum, at the back of a store, is the small prayer room that was still used as a synagogue as recently as about 10 years ago. It is in a state of disarray. At one time, they started moving its furnishings out, and things are scattered all over, including a wheel barrow in the middle of the room. The museum staff have the key to it.
The cemetery in Kisvarda is relatively well kept, with a fence and a resident caretaker. However, there is no map or list of the gravestones. Thanks to rough directions from my aunt, I was able to find my great-grandfather Elias Fischer's gravestone. He was buried in 1926, and has a deeply engraved black marble stone, which was quite legible. (The story is told that my great-uncle Miklos put 5% down on the most expensive gravestone in the shop, and left my unfortunate grandfather to pay the balance. I am grateful to him now.) This gravestone actually has some useful genealogical information, including the title of a book that Elias's father-in-law had written, so I was glad to have the opportunity to photograph it for posterity before it disappears.
One of the things I had hoped to do was search around for old gravestones of other ancestors, but I quickly abandoned that as hopeless. Even in this relatively well kept cemetery, many of the gravestones have fallen down, and the thick vegetation obscured many of the stones. On top of that, most of the older gravestones are made of some soft local rock which seems to dissolve rapidly. The letters quickly become illegible.
This was dramatically obvious when I visited the Jewish cemetery in Gemzse, a village about 10 kilometers south of Kisvarda. My father's father was buried here in 1942. I have a photograph of his gravestone, taken in 1978, in which the letters are still quite legible. Now, they are almost completely gone. Unfortunately, not only are the stones dissolving, but they are also disappearing. When I was here last, in 1973, there were at least a couple of dozen gravestones, including a large one belonging to my great-grandfather Morechai Dov Spiro. Now there are only six left altogether, four standing and two fallen down. Back in the village, I looked up an old friend of my father's, and he happened to be in a bar owned by the mayor of the village. The mayor was quite frank in admitting that people had stolen the gravestones over the years for construction purposes. He wants us to send money to build a fence for the cemetery. Unfortunately, there is practically nothing left to protect with a fence. Perhaps there ought to be a sign, to mark the fact that, in the 1800s, 20 percent of the population of this nameless village was Jewish. (In the 1848 census, there were five Spiro families in Gemzse!) He and others spoke quite warmly of the Jews, who were well remembered. Indeed, my father also says that the Jews and Christians always got along very well in this particular little village.
I also visited Satoraljaujhely. I deliberately timed it for the 28th of Tammuz, the yahrtzeit of the Yismach Moshe, Rabbi Moshe Teitelbaum, the founder of the family of Szatmar Rebbe. (I'm no fan of the current anti-Zionist Satmar hassidim, but Rabbi Moshe was a great man.) The pilgrimage this year was particularly large, since the rebbe himself (the 7th generation descendant) attended. There were over 1000 of the hassidim, and the event made that evening's national news on television. It was the time warp again, seeing the throngs of black-coated hassidim, tzitzis hanging out, walking down the main street of Ujhely just as they would have done 100 years ago.
Rabbi Moshe is buried in the old cemetery, in which the graves are all more than 120 years old. The weather erosion was starkly obvious here. Not only were the letters completely gone, but most of the stones here had completely lost their shape, like snowmen melting on a hot day. If not for the setting, they would not be recognizable as gravestones. Apparently, it is not like this everywhere. Mark Polster photographed some gravestones in Slovakia that date back to the early 1800s, and are still quite legible. However, the combination of the soft stone and (no doubt, serious acid rain problem) means that genealogists are not like to get much information from gravestones in this part of Hungary. Rabbi Teitelbaum's gravestone, of course, is protected from erosion by a building (an "ohel"). Not that I could see it, since there were so many hassidim in front of it.
I visited the archive in Ujhely, which is a particularly valuable resource. It keeps Jewish birth, marriage and death records (probably in violation of the Treaty of Trianon) for former parts of Zemplen county which are now in Slovakia. These have not been microfilmed by the Mormons. The staff were very courteous. They brought out the folder I asked for, and let me browse through it until I quit in exhaustion. The records are arranged in books which include the small towns around each major centre. There is a folder (about 500 pages) for Kiralyhelmec and its dependent villages, covering the years from about 1850 to 1895. For each year, there is a birth, marriage and death section.
I was able to locate the marriage record for my great-grandfather Elias Fischer and great-grandmother Eszter Knopfler, which took place in 1888 in Nagy Kovesd (now Velky Kamenec). I had not known the precise date or place of this previously. The bride was born in Ujhely, but I had known (from a responsum written to him) that the bride's father, Moses Knopfler, had served as rabbi in Nagy Kovesd. I found the death record for this great-great-grandfather, in 1893, which indicated that he had been buried in Nagy Kovesd. This saved me a trip across the border, since I had heard from an acquaintance in Toronto (who had recently visited there) that the Jewish cemetery in Nagy Kovesd is gone, replaced by farmer's fields. I also found some other useful information, including the correct maiden name of my wife's great-grandmother Roza Gottsegen (nee Czukerman), which I had received previously in garbled form from her uncle. It turns out that, while she lived in the Kiralyhelmec region, she was born in Ujhely, and this will enable me to go back to the Ujhely microfilms and possibly go further back in her ancestry.
Ideally, somebody ought to have the whole book photocopied, but this would be a major undertaking. The pages are large and awkward, and do not fit in the photocopier. I had a few entries copied, at the modest charge of 30 forints each. They did not ask for any fee for bringing out the files, so I left a 500 forint donation.
I made a brief side trip to the picturesque town of Sarospatak (well worth a visit), and another brief stop in Nyiregyhaza, the capital of Szabolcs, and a real city. I visited my father's 81 year old second cousin Ignac Spiro. Ignac recently retired as president of the synagogue, the last one functioning in all of Szabolcs county. He lamented the fact that they rarely get a quorum nowadays. The windows of the synagogue were recently broken by vandals, and he associates this with the change of government in the recent election.
Along the lines of further Spiro research, I has a list of all the Spiro entries in the Hungarian phone books. There are only about half a dozen, and I knew all of them except for one. I phoned up, and got the wife of the individual. She was at first surprised about the nature of my call, but soon became interested. I started by asking whether her husband was Jewish, and she answered in the negative. Why would I think this, she asked, "Spiro is a very nice Magyar name." She had worked with Jews for many years, and liked them very much. She insisted that, in 30 years of marriage, the subject had never come up between her and her husband. However, she admitted that she never knew her husband's parents. As her final debating point, she pointed out that there is an author in Budapest named Gyorgy Spiro, "and he's not Jewish either."
Gyorgy, who is in fact Jewish (and has been vilified for it by some antisemitic Hungarians on the Internet), got a good chuckle out of this when I told him about it later. Spiro is not and never has been a Hungarian name. Its bearers can be either of Jewish or Greek ancestry, and in Hungary almost certainly the former. This is an interesting example of how little some people know of their ancestry.
On the way into Budapest, I stopped at the main Jewish cemetery, where my infant brother is buried. It is immense, a maze of narrow lanes through a forest, and in its own way very beautiful. I got lost, partly because the metal sign indicating his section had rusted and fallen off. The person at the gatehouse had a map, which ultimately enabled me to find it. Make sure you consult it before you go in. It is so large that they actually encourage you to drive in to reach the back sections. Budapest has the largest Jewish community in central Europe, but it has about six times as many dead Jews as living ones.
Budapest is the Paris of the east. If you like crumbling baroque architecture (and I do), you will love it. Every old apartment building is decorated with ornate carvings and statuary. The balconies (those that haven't fallen down yet) are works of art.
Budapest has become very dynamic, and is full of interesting shops. Prices are very low by North American standards (but not relative to the low earnings of the average Hungarian). A subway trip, at 70 forints, costs about one-fifth of what it does in Toronto. Book stores, both new and used, are more plentiful than in any other city I have every visited. Books are particularly cheap, as already noted, and I bought as many as I could carry. I also found the people in Budapest remarkably helpful and courteous, as large cities go. You can go into a store and browse, without buying, and not get any surly looks.
The Dohany street synagogue's restoration is just about complete, and its interior, especially, is breathtakingly beautiful. With a capacity for 3000 people, it is said to be the synagogue in Europe. It's restoration is thanks to a foundation set up by the actor Tony Curtis (born Bernard Schwartz) and is functioning again. It is magnificent, by far the most beautiful synagogue I have ever seen. The golden ark, the fantastic carvings in the woodwork, the painted ceilings, are all works of art. The sabbath morning I was there, however, only about 2 percent of the seats were occupied, and most of these seemed to be tourists.
The Jewish district near the synagogue has some used bookstores, and even a kosher pastry shop. I had the pleasure of exploring these with H-Sig founder Louis Schonfeld, who happened to be in Budapest at the same time as me.
My genealogical project in Budapest centered around the Orszagos Szechenyi library, the national library of Hungary. It is located in the former Royal Palace on the hilltop in Buda, and a one day visitor's pass is available for 300 forints. The staff are very helpful, but be prepared for a substantial wait before the materials are brought up from storage. You are given a number, and when your materials are ready your number is flashed on the electronic board in the reading room. This library, incidentally, is one of the very few places in Hungary that is air conditioned, making it a particular pleasure on a very hot day.
My first search was in the obituary collection (some 800,000) that I had heard about. I assumed that these were clippings from newspapers, but I turned out to be quite mistaken. They are, in effect, formal invitations to a funeral, many with black crepe borders, These were used in days past by the elegant people in Hungary. None of my ancestors were elegant enough to appear in this collection. In any event, the most one can gather from them is the date and place of the funeral. Unless the deceased ancestor had quite a unique name, it is not even possible to verify if you have the right person unless you already know when he died. All in all, I would rate this as about 3 out of 10 for usefulness to the genealogist.
Following up on the obituary front, I called up microfilms of the newspaper Zemplen for 1893, and Kisvarda Lapok for 1905, since I had specific dates of death for great-great-grandparents in these towns. I assumed that newspapers in those days, as they do today, contained death notices, which might include biographical information. To my disappointment, they had not yet been invented. The Zemplen newspaper (published in Ujhely) did have an extensive local news column, which included lots of chit chat, including items about the Jewish community. If one had weeks to spend going through it all, it is quite possible that some useful family history items might come up, but unfortunately I only had a day to devote to this. It was only 7 PM, two hours before closing time, but I was exhausted, and made my way home. I guessed I had done as much (probably more) for the memory of my ancestors as anybody could be expected to do.
I did return to castle hill as a tourist, to explore the former castle and the very interesting Budapest history museum in the wing adjacent to the library. Budapest is wonderfully compact. From my apartment near Deak Square, it was only a 15 minute walk across the Chain Bridge to castle hill. I had planned to take the cable car, but instead discovered that there is a path up the hill which makes for a very enjoyable walk, with very nice places to stop and turn around to enjoy the view.
I did not accomplish quite as much, genealogically speaking, as I had hoped, but the trip was certainly quite worthwhile. Budapest itself is a wonderful city to visit, and I recommend it without any qualms as a holiday destination. If you can learn something about your ancestors while you are there, so much the better.
Click here to see photographs from this trip.
To return to my new home page, click here.
Peter Spiro, August 1998