Tag Archives: subotica

The Synagogues of Szeged and Subotica

If you’re bicycling through southern Hunganry and the adjoining (formerly Hungarian) province of  Vojvodina in northern Serbia, you can’t but be aware of the terrible displacements and atrocities that have been committed in the region by one ethnic, religious or cultural group against another over the last several centuries, and even quite recently, nearby.

One such atrocity, the Nazi murder of the Jewish population of the region, stands out. So, still, do the beautiful synagogues of Szeged and Subotica, both of which I saw earlier this week. They are a stark reminder of the sheer size of the Jewish communities in these two cities, communities which, as I understand it, are virtually non-existent, or very small, today.

The synagogue in Szeged (1907) is the fourth largest in the world, and the second largest in Hungary, after the Dohany Street Synagogue in Budapest. It is in good condition and is used as a concert hall as well as for worship.

The synagogue in Subotica (1902), inspired by the great Hungarian architect Odon Lechner, was built for a community that numbered around 3,000 at the time. It’s another great example of Hungarian art nouveau.

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Both great buildings are evidence and poignant reminders of the Jewish life and culture that must have been part of everyone’s everyday life in these and other cities in Central and Eastern Europe and the Balkans until the 1940s.

But I write about this mainly because I am intrigued by the language of the memorial tablet placed outside the Subotica Synagogue:

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The  Jews, it says, ‘perished in fascist death camps.’ So, it seems to imply, that had nothing to do with the local populations, or local hatreds. It all happened in a faraway place.

The description places the blame on ‘fascism’, as if anti-Semitism was, and is, principally a matter of political ideology, rather than something with darker, less intellectual origins (an irrational hatred that lay at the heart of Christian European culture for centuries)- something that can be ‘educated’ away, and blamed on specific political leaders rather than on the population at large. Of course, I may be maligning the people of Subotica. I don’t know if they were exemplary in their protection of the Jewish community (as Serbia was, in general) or not. Even if so, the description is misleading. The murder of the Jews was not a ‘fascist’ crime. It was not a German crime. It was a Nazi crime, inspired by the leaders of the Nazi party and supported by millions of others, in Germany and elsewhere, who shared their hatred.

The inscription dates from 1994, a time perhaps when Communist ideology was still lingering in the country (Yugoslavia still?) and it was convenient to wipe the slate clean and claim that in the absence of ‘fascism’ the danger no longer existed.

But I remember a train journey I made from Belgrade to Budapest in the summer of 1987, when both Hungary and Yugoslavia were still nominally communist. I talked for an hour or so with a pleasant middle-class lady who was eager to practise her excellent English. For some reason we got onto the events of the Second World War and I asked a few questions about Jewish survivors, and about the scale of the transportation and murder of the region’s Jews.

‘I know it was awful,’ she said. ‘And it’s awful that the Jewish communities were almost entirely destroyed, but you know we never really liked them.’

So much for the eradication of the irrational by political re-education! Anti-Semitism was not specifically a fascist phenomenon.

 

 

 

The Turning World

There’s a story that goes around Central Europe about a man called Pavel, or Pal, or Paul, who was born in Austro-Hungary, grew up in Romania, lived briefly in Ruthenia, and Hungary, worked in the Soviet Union and died in Ukraine. All without ever leaving his tiny village in Sub-Carpathian Ruthenia. Given the monstrous behaviour of those who trample across remote corners of the world, he must have been a master of tact to have survived at all. He probably spoke at least a dozen languages fluently.

It’s an unfamiliar concept for a British Citizen, that our nationality and allegiances might change around us, but we may soon, if Scotland achieves independence, have to accept a change of citizenship (United Kingdom of England, Wales and Northern Ireland).

I thought of Pavel, Pal or Paul yesterday whilst in the Serbian city of Subotica, just across the border from Szeged. It’s a town that’s been stamped a dozen or more times into my passport, since it lies on the rail and road routes from Budapest to Belgrade. It’s actually a charming small city, replete with the usual fin-de-siècle art nouveau town hall, banks, shops, churches and synagogues (no mosques, as far as I know).

It’s a town that has endured many ‘affiliations’, to use a term that Wikipedia uses, most of them probably not affiliated by choice.

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Terrible atrocities have been committed in the city, by one ethnic group against another, whilst enforcing one affiliation or another, not least by the Nazis and their henchmen against the city’s 3,000 Jews, transported and murdered in Auschwitz.

I stopped to eat two slices of pizza, four cups of tea and a plate of tiramisu (all quite permissible when one is cycling nearly 100 km a day), and since I like to practice my imperfect Hungarian I asked the waiter if he spoke the language. He did, he said, since one of his parents is ‘Hungarian’ and the other ‘Serbian’.  I made a half-hearted attempt to order ‘hot black tea with cold milk on the side’ in Hungarian, but he greatly preferred to practice his excellent English, which, in any case, put my poor Hungarian to shame. But since it’s a fashionable concept I asked him how he ‘identified’.

‘I am a Vojvodinian,’ he said.

If you’re not aware that Vojvodina is a place, you might think this as absurd as identifying as a Vulcan (which certain people do (and who are we to judge?)).

But in fact it’s a clever ruse, and the best possible answer if you come from a place that everyone else has trampled over. Vojvodina is an identifiable region but, sadly (or wisely?) never one that was affiliated only to itself.