Reclaiming a Heritage

...In the beginning, these places had another face...

...Dim lighting is diffused by cigarette smoke...

...Its physical redevelopment got off the ground in the early 1990s, on the heels of an interest in Jewish life that had already manifested itself in Poland...

...It is not a presentation, but life—and the future, too...

...Some people I know have scoffed at the idea of a Jewish bookshop succeeding in a still rundown area that is off the beaten tourist track...

...It features ’60s retro furniture, a dimly lit orange color scheme, free WiFi, and a basement dance floor...

...The café hosts exhibits and sometimes other Jewish events...

...Now, this is life...

...Particularly not one like the Red Synagogue, which was listed as a historic monument and was the object of a restoration campaign...

...We met in Sirály, a funky downtown café in an old building on Király Street, at the edge of the Seventh District, Budapest’s historic Jewish quarter...

...Besides a knack for business, he has what I can only call a vision...

...More important, much of its interior remained intact, including its Aron Kodesh, or Holy Ark, where the Torah scrolls were once kept, on the east wall of the sanctuary...

...When I was there Christmas Eve, a big Chanukah menorah still hung on one wall, left over from a series of parties, candlelightings and other events to mark the holiday...

...after all, it’s my neighborhood...

...You can find tombstones in the Jewish cemeteries here whose epitaphs describe the deceased as a “pioneer of the Magyarization” of the Jewish people...

...Now I can open a caf...

...Kazimierz is intact...

...They formed a rare surviving Jewish complex in Lithuania...

...The furnishings exude a lifetime of tobacco, coffee and conversation A few framed blowups of old Budapest photographs hang on one wall...

...Just like many other decaying historical monuments, the nearly empty quarter, the abandoned synagogue and the neglected Jewish cemetery turned into a true reflection of our society...

...In addition, they operate an independent publishing house, Austeria...

...Sirály, one of a cluster of new “Jewish” cafés in the neighborhood, was the only place open...

...The valuable Jewish input into local culture faded away, and people forgot it...

...Kraków’s Festival of Jewish Culture, organized by non-Jews for an overwhelmingly non-Jewish audience, was founded in 1988...

...But lately a number of restaurants, boutiques and cafés have sprouted in the rundown buildings and grimy streets...

...It is the most evident of the new “Jewish” cafés, if only because there is a big mezuzah on the front doorpost...

...But we hate Nazis, racists, weird people...

...The café is located down the street from Budapest’s main Orthodox synagogue...

...The vast majority are totally assimilated...

...Thus “Jewishness” is generally linked not to shtetl nostalgia but to liberalism and broad cultural interests—even, as a Jewish artist friend once told me, to what literature one has on one’s bookshelves...

...In contrast to the sometimes kitschy “Jewish style” cafés that cater to tourists in Kraków and other East-Central European cities where few Jews live, there is nothing overtly “Jewish” about most of those in Budapest...

...the situation was different...

...Actually, the café is a squat...

...NonJews, of course, make up a good part of the clientele, but they are where young Budapest Jews hang out...

...If we hear anyone saying anything racist, we kick them out...

...Wojtek made a telling prediction: “Eventually this will become a very snobby, elegant neighborhood, with very expensive property prices...

...It will be gentrified...

...But both of us are Jews, we have a lot of Jewish friends and clients, and we are in the Jewish district,” he noted, adding: “Everyone is welcome—Chinese, Christian, Jewish, whatever...

...The Most DRAMATIC—and best-known—Jewish quarter rejuvenation in postCommunist East-Central Europe has occur red in Kraków’s Kazimierz district...

...Since the early 1900s, various proposals for an avenue that would punch through the district have been rejected, leaving its fate in limbo...

...Though I only spend part of my time here, I have seen the changes in the old Jewish quarter up close...

...By 2007 it encompassed some 200 concerts, lectures, performances, workshops, tours, and other events...

...It opened a little over two years ago, in an old three-story building with tall arched windows, giving it the appearance of having been there forever...

...In Budapest, Jewish people don’t go into a ‘just Jewish’ establishement...

...While tracking the condition of synagogues and Jewish cemeteries, I have watched how—and for what purpose—former Jewish quarters in towns and cities of different countries have been revived...

...That is Sirály’s identity...

...For nearly two decades, I have been documenting sites of Jewish heritage in East-Central Europe and observing the process of their restoration and transformation...

...it does not legally occupy the premises...

...And I have no doubt that he will...

...The crowds spilling out of it well past midnight are so noisy, they said, that they sleep in a back room...

...bulletin boards flutter with notices...

...These are two separate things...

...Word came from Lithuania that an entire wall of the so-called Red Synagogue in the small town of Jonis?kis, in the deep north of the country, had suddenly crumbled...

...It formally opened in November in the heart of the Seventh District, on a shabby block across the street from a kosher restaurant and around the corner from Szóda and Szimpla Kert...

...It was thought to be one of only two Holy Arks that survived World War II in provincial Lithuania...

...Everyone comes here, lots of young Jews and non-Jews, a certain type of Hungarian intellectual,” he points out...

...In The New Leader more than 10 years ago, I wrote about the little town of Boskovice, in the Czech Republic, whose Jewish quarter was restored thanks to a municipal project aimed at reclaiming its past...

...Literally “sea gull” in Hungarian, Sirály means “fantastic” in local slang...

...The police, who come by routinely, have so far allowed it to operate...

...Wojtek and Malgosia Ornat, the Polish couple who have been so influential in the revitalization of Kazimierz, recently bought an apartment almost directly opposite Szimpla Kert...

...Built in 1865, it stood next to another 19th-century synagogue, the scalloped-roof White Synagogue, named for its stucco walls...

...Budapest’s Seventh District is where I have maintained an apartment for nearly 10 years...

...From the pictures a friend e-mailed to me, it seemed that the wall had simply disintegrated into a splayed-out pile of bricks, pulling down much of the roof in the process...

...Crowded every night and open until the wee hours, they attract mainly the younger generation...

...TWO OTHER popular cafés are Szóda and Szimpla Kert...

...They are not Jewish places per se...

...It was the east wall of the building, with the Ark, that collapsed...

...Hungary has the highest number of Jews of any post-Communist state outside the former Soviet Union, with some 90,000 in the capital alone...

...Low music plays in the background—jazz, Latin, even African pop...

...At the time, the café was such an isolated venture that Jewish visitors, spotting its Hebrew-style signage, occasionally mistook it for a synagogue or other religious facility...

...Black chalkboards list drinks, other offerings, and special functions...

...In all the times I’ve been there, I have never heard any klezmer music...

...POSTSCRIPT: News I received around New Year’s was a sobering reminder that not all old Jewish quarters in EastCentral Europe are being revitalized...

...Wojtek and Malgosia Ornat opened the first Jewish-style café in Kazimierz in 1992...

...In a mixed place like this, everyone can come...

...I remember sitting at an umbrellashaded table with Wojtek in 1993, eating strawberries and discussing the future of Kazimierz...

...Old buildings collapse all the time, and I have seen my share of ruined synagogues...

...A travel piece in the New York Times at the end of December made this official...

...Forty years have passed,” he said...

...Its centerpiece is the most extensive and important complex of Jewish institutions in Central Europe: synagogues, cemeteries, marketplaces, schools, plus other buildings and monuments—almost all of which had been abandoned or in ruinous condition in 1990...

...Some people think it’s sick to have a café here, but I disagree,” he said, looking at the dilapidated structures around us...

...Although the core of the district is anchored by three great synagogues and the religious traditions they embrace, it also embodies the flavor of an urban community...

...The main area has a barrel-vaulted ceiling and walls painted a dirty cream color...

...We don’t consider this a ‘Jewish’ place, and we didn’t open with that idea,” one of owners, Peter Stern, told me last year...

...they recognize places where they were children...

...The Times described Szimpla Kert as a “mainstay” of the new Seventh District scene, “an enormous space with rough concrete floors and furniture that looks as though it had been dragged from yard sales, including a bathtub modified by cutting out one side and adding a few cushions to transform it into a sofa...

...Full disclosure: Austeria has just brought out a collection of my New Leader columns, entitled Letters from Europe (and Elsewhere...

...Yet I don’t recall offhand any of the synagogues that I have visited or written about actually just falling down...

...The Ornats have been spending a lot of time here because they have expanded their operations to Budapest—not with a café but a branch of their bookstore...

...But the town maintained a little exhibit on Jewish history in the Red Synagogue, and concerts and other events were occasionally held there...

...But as many as 15,000 people routinely revel past midnight at the festival’s open-air final concert...

...The big question about the district then was, “What’s to be done...

...I remember, however, that when Wojtek first started his enterprises in Kraków 16 years ago, the Jewish quarter there was far more derelict and far less frequented than is Budapest’s Seventh District today...

...Ruth Ellen Gruber writes regularly for The New Leader on her travels in Europe...

...It is owned by two Budapest-born Jews in their 30s who returned to Budapest after living in Israel...

...For in Budapest, unlike the other towns and cities in the region, there is a large and viable Jewish community...

...Some, taking advantage of the free WiFi service, are crouched over laptop computers...

...In fact, they form the hub of an alternative Jewish youth scene that is eons removed from synagogue services or Jewish Community Center programs...

...Developers, local officials, preservationists, and civic action groups have clashed for many years over revitalization plans...

...Today, the Ornats own the popular Klezmer Hois café/restaurant/hotel, something of a landmark in Kazimierz...

...Until recently, you couldn’t think of doing something like this...

...And artists will come too...

...Out of Darkness, New Life,” declared the headline...

...The aim, says Schonberger, is to have Jewish cultural content in a general-style caf...

...The sudden destruction was, my friend wrote, “a thousand pities...

...Only about 200 Jews live in all of Kraków...

...I think this represents a big success...

...As a result, the old Jewish quarter is beginning to become one of Budapest’s new hot spots...

...The Seventh District has long been among the Hungarian capital’s poorest and least improved inner-city neighborhoods...

...The Kazimierz District, meanwhile, evolved from a desolate graveyard of Jewish Culture into a popular tourist and nightlife venue...

...Szóda is located around the corner from several synagogues as well as the offices of the Hungarian Jewish Federation...

...An exhibit on Jewish Boskovice mounted in 1992, the brochure said, was conceived as part of the entire renovation “to remind the public of the quarter’s past glory, to emphasize its values both obvious and subtle, to readdress ‘accepted’ facts, and to address irrational prejudice...

...The district’s “history and recent rise to trendiness,” the story said, “evoke comparisons to the Lower East Side of New York...

...I would call them ‘Jewishfriendly,’” explains 27-year-old Adam Schonberger, a rabbi’s son who plays in a klezmer fusion band organizes concerts and Jewish youth events, and helps manage Sirály...

...They also run a well-stocked Jewish bookstore on the ground floor of an unused synagogue they have leased as a space for exhibitions and cultural events...

...During the Communist years of ‘elaborate plans and bright tomorrows,’ the quarter became dilapidated and depopulated,” read a brochure produced in the 1990s detailing the undertaking...

...Reflecting on the impact of his helping to recapture Kazimierz’ “Jewish” image among tourists and non-Jews, Wojtek told me: “People from villages turn to me for advice on how to open a Jewish restaurant...

...not only for foreigners, but for young people, young Jews...

...For more than a dozen years, a local woman had spearheaded efforts to repair and preserve the building...

...There are two issues— business and emotions...

...We did not have much choice...

...As far back as the 19th century, Budapest Jews prided themselves on their Magyar identity...

...There is a big—and important—difference between its revitalization and that of most of the other Jewish quarters in East-Central Europe...

...There, as elsewhere following the collapse of Communism, the rediscovery of Jewish history became a symbol of democratic change...

...The café describes itself as a “coffee house and fun place...

...Now Jews are coming back to visit...

...Patrons—including shaggy-looking men with beards and ponytails— sit at small, round wooden tables...

...Sirály is run partly by Marom, a Jewish youth organization that has its office on one of the upper floors, and partly by the director of a (non-Jewish) theater group...

...It’s life, living...

...The Red Synagogue had Gothic windows and a big Star of David in the upper part of its facade...

...What I want to do,” Wojtek told me, “is foster exchanges...

...Already there is a wellknown composer who has bought a place here...

...The efforts were fitful, stalled for lack of funds...

...Letter from Budapest Reclaiming a Heritage By Ruth Ellen Gruber Budapest On The afternoon of this past Christmas Eve, I gathered with a group of friends for coffee and pálinka (Hungarian brandy...

...I want to bring Hungarian Jewish culture to Kraków and Polish Jewish culture to Budapest...