Tagged Budapest

In Budapest, Hanukkah comes out of the shadows and onto the ice rink

Rabbi Slomo Koves, right, and a participant at Chabad Hungary's 2015 Hanukkah on Ice event take selfies at Budapest's City Park Ice Rink, Dec. 6, 2015. (Courtesy of EMIH)
December 6, 2017 / Cnaan Liphshiz, JTA

  BUDAPEST (JTA) — The outdoor ice skating rink — the largest in Central Europe — in Budapest’s city center has been part and parcel of Hungary’s Christmas tradition for nearly 150 years. Stretching across 3.5 acres between Heroes’ Square and Vajdahunyad Castle, the Budapest City Park Ice Rink… Read more »

At an Israeli moshav, filling in the blanks on a WWII rescue effort

Budapest Jews crowding into the Glass House, a Budapest factory that housed an operation credited with saving more than 40,000 of the Hungarian city’s Jews in 1944 and 1945. (Courtesy of Beit Ha’edut)
March 23, 2016 / Hillel Kuttler, JTA

SEEKING KIN The Seeking Kin column aims to help reunite long-lost relatives and friends. NIR GALIM, Israel (JTA) – On a recent afternoon in a museum in this moshav community near the port city of Ashdod, Hodaya Gadba held up a black-and-white photograph of a three-story building and pronounced,… Read more »

Non-Jewish activists link arms with Hungarian Jews in ‘symbols war’

Protesters at a 2014 rally in Budapest against the Hungarian government's planned statue that was seen as minimizing Hungarian complicity during the Holocaust. (Cnaan Liphshiz)
March 11, 2016 / Cnaan Liphshiz, JTA

(JTA) – Hungarian officials likely anticipated some Jewish opposition to their decision to erect a monument in Budapest to a Holocaust-era lawmaker who promoted anti-Semitic legislation. What they probably didn’t expect was that the Feb. 24 unveiling of a bust honoring Gyorgy Donath would attract a protest of mostly… Read more »

Austria beckons as recession, xenophobia prompt Jews to ditch Hungary
February 26, 2013 / Cnaan Liphshiz, JTA
Demonstrators protesting racism in Hungary in Budapest, December 2012. (Bela B. Molnar)

BUDAPEST (JTA) — Three years ago, Fanni moved to Vienna from her native Hungary with her husband. Now she is pregnant. Though the couple would prefer to raise their child near their Jewish families in Budapest, rising nationalism and an economic recession are leading them to stay in Austria.… Read more »

Hungarian intellectuals relieved to see anti-Semitic play scrapped
August 29, 2012 / Cnaan Liphshiz, JTA
A demonstrator outside the New Theatre in Budapest was part of a crowd of more than 1,000 protesting the appointment of the theater's new director, Gyorgy Dornerr, Oct. 22, 2011. (B. Molnar/latogato.blogspot.nl)

(JTA) – It’s a relieved Judit Csaki from Budapest that calls journalists with the anticlimactic news: The dramatic news conference on state-sponsored anti-Semitism that she had scheduled for next week is canceled, as Budapest Mayor Istvan Tarlos has just announced the scrapping of plans to stage an anti-Semitic play… Read more »

Australian court’s failure to extradite alleged ex-Nazi raises ire, questions
August 15, 2012
Marika Weinberger, a Holocaust survivor and former president of the Australian Association of Jewish Holocaust Survivors and Descendants. (Henry Benjamin)

SYDNEY (JTA) — In a court ruling that is bringing new attention to Australia’s failure to prosecute alleged Nazi-era war criminals, the government will not surrender to Hungary the man believed to be the country’s last World War II war crimes suspect. The nation’s High Court ruled Wednesday that… Read more »

Retracing Herzl’s footsteps in Europe, Israelis find Diaspora life has much to offer
September 27, 2011 / Alex Weisler, JTA
The Klezmer fusion band Butterfly Effect entertaining Israelis on Herzl tour at Fogashaz, one of the "ruin pubs" of Budapest's Jewish quarter. (Alex Weisler)

BUDAPEST, Hungary (JTA) — Sometimes it takes a Zionist organization to show Israeli Jews that Israel isn’t the only place where Jews have a future. At least that’s what the World Zionist Organization and Habonim Dror, the labor Zionist youth organization, managed to do with a whirlwind trip this… Read more »