MANDACORE HUNGARY : ENGLISH VERSION This links to an essay on personal cleanliness but there are also many other articles about how Hungarian people did things in the past, such how they made soap to how they did baby care, such as no strollers or prams but a mom could take a cradle into the fields, that are translated into English. We can learn a lot about how our great grandparents and ancestors lived in those days before houses had indoor plumbing and toilets. Men and boys used a tub first, then the women and children, then the baby - which is where we got the saying about not throwing the baby out with the bathwater. My sensibility is that the baby might have needed to be first! I know soap can sanitize but I also know that going too long without bathing can mean infections. (Lately some Hollywood stars have been commenting about how they do not personally bathe too often.)
You can also do a search and many interesting things come up in Hungarian, such as booklets about places that were probably intended for tourists to various cities and regions that include images as well as statistical work. I'm finding that searching for the region or town is helpful.
Of interest to Jewish Hungarian ancestry are lists of tradespeople who are keeping the Sabbath and other books of lists of members.
Follow me. First I searched for Abauj (Now Abauj-Torno-Zemplen administrative district. MANDADB HU - Searching for Abauj
This is page 2 and we see MAGYRORSZAG SZOMBATTARTO ..... Directory of Hungarian traders, tradesmen, and manufacturers keeping Sabbath.... It was published out of Budapest and contains many communities.
Click on it and the page is opening to a large view of the cover and more information such as the date of 1927 and that this booklet was put together by rabbis.
To the left under the larger image of the cover is a little icon that says DOCUMENT. We click on that and it opens a PDF file showing the content.
Now this is the tricky part, if you can't read Hungarian, because it would be nice to cut and past text into the Google Translator...
However if you have Jewish Hungarian roots in Abauj you are probably focused on finding certain surnames or individuals. You can probably take a screen shot or download the file for future use.
I find it interesting that such books were made. The intention was so that members of a community who were traveling or wanted to make deals could find persons like themselves.
There existed at the time a tradition of hiring a Christian person to come to the house on the Sabbath to do some of the essential work, so that the Jewish person could observe the Sabbath religiously by not doing work. An example would be to light the hearth fire so that the house would stay warm. Animals needed to be fed. And so on. My understanding is that the Sabbath began at sundown on Friday and ended at sundown on Saturday. The women would prepare the food and do as much as possible to finish their work before Sundown. Therefore, on Sunday, when the Christians had their Sabbath, the Jewish people could be back at work, having had a good rest. A few years back I had neighbors who still observed this Sabbath. He was a lawyer and she was a nurse; they considered it to be family time and study time.
As you see on this list, there are many surnames that most Americans think of as Jewish or German Jewish. The history on this is that most Jews who came into Hungary came in from the North, Poland - Galicia, and there too they had surnames that appear to be German Jewish with some using Polish or Ukrainian surnames. Some of them did change their surnames to be Hungarian or Hungarian translations in meaning. On this list you see it is men and men who are using a Hungarian given name. This is not the same as their "Jewish name." It is a Civil name that one might coordinate with the Civil registration of births, marriages, and deaths.
When it come to the trades, there were Jewish people who changed their names to reflect their trade. Therefore some trade names have both Christian and Jewish people with those names. Schreiber- clerk.
However, in 1927, post World War I and prior to Word War II and the Holocaust, there were thriving Jewish Communities in Hungary, and especially in "wine country," So a booklet like this is a between wars moment in time.
So let's page through. We can do this by clicking on the individual page icons to the left.
I notice:
Csillag Emanuel - Hungarian surname meaning Star
Zipszer Edy : Reference to the Germans of Szepes county called Zipszers.
Several surnames with Low : Reference to Lowe, now Lviv, Ukraine.
Page icon 7 : I note that a woman or two is being named.
titkar - secretary Piroska Fleishmann
társelnök - co-chair : Abelesz Emilne - the ne means "the wife of" Emil Abelsz
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