INTERNATIONAL HOLOCAUST REMEMBRANCE DAY : THREE SURVIVORS - HUNGARIAN - REMEMBER AUSCHWITZ

NATIONAL ARCHIVES OF HUNGARY DATABASES : ALWAYS UPLOADING MORE : PARISH REGISTERS and MORE

NATIONAL ARCHIVES OF HUNGARY FINDING AIDS :  includes links to searchable databases. 

HUNGARICANA SELECTIONS includes Lutheran Collection, Catholic Collection, Unitarian Collection, Calvinist Collection, Jewish Collection and more.

Here is the selection for Catholic Collections.

The Benedictine Order

The Franciscan Order

Diocese Archives of Gyor   

The Archdiocese Collections of Kalocsa   

Pazmany Peter Catholic University Faculty of Religious Studies.  

Szombathely Diocese Archives 

Szekesfehervar County Collections

Diocesan Circulars

Schematism of Bacs County

LEARN MORE ABOUT HUNGARIAN SOCIETY and CULTURE at HUNGARIAN NATIONAL DIGITAL ARCHIVES including HUNGARIAN JEWISH CULTURE

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

C 2022 Magyar American BlogSpot

HUNGARIAN / HUNGARIAN-AMERICAN STEREOTYPE : INSECURE and ALWAYS TRYING TO PROVE YOUR PEOPLE ARE INTELLIGENT!

I've known people like this, so I started thinking about their ethnicity.  This is my no means a poll, but most of the braggarts I've met were Jewish.  "So and So does This and That - Very Successful!"  I've heard that one a lot.  It makes me feel sorry for the Jewish person who is NOT successful in a worldly way.

A free weekly magazine called The Jewish Journal that is available for the taking in libraries and around town dedicates a space to all the Jewish people of accomplishment in history, to stroke ethnic- religious pride. It's paid-for advertising.

However, I've heard that Hungarians of every religious type bring up famous scientists and inventors in particular, to prove that they have their geniuses as a way of letting other people know they should not dismiss their own intelligence.  Defensiveness mixed with ethnic pride!

I do tend to think of braggarts as insecure, and maybe Hungary, being a country that is more like David than the Giant Goliath of the Old Testament of the Holy Bible, has more to prove.
So far I have not encountered Hungarian braggarts here in the United States!

C 2017 Magyar-American BlogSpot

HUNGARIAN WOMEN : SPECIAL CONSIDERATIONS : JEWISH WOMEN AND RECORDS : GENEALOGY TIP #4

HUNGARIAN WOMEN : SPECIAL CONSIDERATIONS : JEWISH WOMEN AND RECORDS  : GENEALOGY TIP #4

Think Jewish women and you think of THE MATCHMAKER!

Some years ago I met some people who are working on going through church records to extract Jewish individuals for the use of the website JEWISHGEN. One of them told me that while going through CHURCH records he had to start all over because he had been listing anyone with a Jewish sounding name and didn't realize that some Christians used Old Testament names for their children. (And some people also do not know that "Jewish" surnames in common use (rather than religious use) are often simply names used by Christians also. This was true in Hungary.)

You don't have to be Jewish to find  the website Jewishgen useful. I have an account with them which I use from time to time when I'm helping someone else with their genealogy or if I want town information, location, the various names the place has gone through depending on what nation was ruling it (German names, Slovak names, Polish names), or to see POSTCARDS of the towns. It can be interesting to find out what happened in that town during World War II or the Holocaust. You might interview your Hungarian great-grandmother and ask her what she experienced or witnessed while living in Holocaust era Europe.  Remember that there were some Gentiles who aided Jews in hiding or leaving the country and you might want to run the names and the towns through a web site like Yad Vashem.  (The link is one my sidebar.)  A Yiskor Book is a book that remembers the Jews who died from a town in the Holocaust.  Some of these books are on the Internet, some in translation, some not, and were originally composed by listing people the living remembered.  They may not be comprehensive.

I want to make a mention of Jewish Women in Jewish church or temple records.  In eastern and central Europe a physical church was often the largest, best built, you could say safest place to store records and the priests were sometimes the only educated person who could read or write for miles.  So if there were just a few families that were Jewish who had to travel to their own congregation, the priest recorded their children's births with a note that they were Jewish.  As previously mentioned, finding people listed in Catholic or other Christian church records does not mean they actually attended the church, unless you find it is a mixed marriage or see a record of the baptism of a child. Notice if a birth is recorded without a note of baptism following.

In the previously mentioned 300 years of one small town Catholic church record that I read I found one marriage of a Jewish man and Catholic woman.  They were married in the church and their children were baptized and raised Catholic.  (Kind of like Ms. Charlotte Casiraghi of Monaco and her child with a Jewish comedian, Gad Elmaleh,  Raphael, who was recently Baptised there.)

The idea that a marriage should occur in the bride's church no matter what the religion of the groom here in America or that in Catholic marriage the parents must agree to raise their children Catholic in order to be married in the church doesn't always hold up in the old European records I've seen.

Larger Jewish settlements, places were the Jewish people had their own congregations usually had their own ledgers and records.  I have read these temple ledgers and have discovered that there is a significant difference from contemporary Catholic and Christian church records.  AND THAT IS THAT I FOUND THAT THE MOTHER'S NAME WAS ALWAYS RECORDED and not only that but the name of the midwife and the name of the person who circumcises the baby boy!   This is no doubt because of the belief that a child wasn't Jewish without having a Jewish woman for a mother.

Settlements tended to be about 5 miles from each other, depending on the geographical considerations.  This meant that a person could walk to the next town along a road or using horse or horse and buggy get there in a half day or less of travel.  People knew people and matchmaking was done by friends, families, priests and rabbi's; usually the marrying couple lived not too far from each other.  In Hungarian small towns there seems to be a lot of what I call "childhood sweetheart marriages" among boys and girls who always knew each other and then grew up.  But by the 1900's some boys and girls grew up and didn't obey their parents when it came time to marry.  Love Matches were taking hold.

If you take a good look at old maps or even new ones you'll see a plethora of small settlements and towns listed throughout Hungary, Slovakia, Poland, really all over Europe.

While one person I was in contact with told me his Yeshiva boy grand father would have never associated with the non-Jews in their Polish market town (at the time near the Slovak border) but research the era, the time and the place, especially where there was trade, big markets, and you may find that Jews and Gentiles enjoyed chatting with each other, were doing business, and were not so isolated or offish with each other as all that.

I recently found this site!  HUNGARIAN JEWISH ROOTS

December 2023 link update http://www.jewishroots.hu/en_generalgenealogy_1.html

To bring up other posts from this series click on the label Pro Tips-Hungary Women

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BARDEJOV - A MEDIEVAL TOWN

UNESCO LINK TO BARDEJOV MEDIEVAL TOWN  full site

Bardejov Town Conservation Reserve : SOME EXCERPTS

Bardejov is a small but exceptionally complete and well-preserved example of a fortified medieval town, which typifies the urbanisation in this region. Among other remarkable features, it also contains a small Jewish quarter around a fine 18th-century synagogue."


The Town Hall was built in 1505-9, the first building in Slovakia with Renaissance stone moulding. The public buildings include the late Gothic Humanistic Grammar School, built on the site of a medieval school, modified in Renaissance style and again in classical style. The municipal wine house of the early 15th century was a storehouse for wines from the vicinity of the town and from the Tokai region. The burghers' houses on their deep narrow plots have undergone many modifications as the result of repeated fires. This type of building was introduced by German traders from Silesia in the early 13th century. The Renaissance saw the addition of ornate facades to the two-storey merchants' houses, converting them into luxurious houses. The most significant Jewish element in Bardejov is the Great Synagogue, built in 1725-47. The complex also contains ritual baths, a kosher slaughterhouse and a meeting building, now a school.

From the first quarter of the 18th century, Slovaks and Hassidic Jews came into Bardejov in large numbers. The burghers' houses were rebuilt or modified in keeping with current architectural fashion, a Jewish quarter with a synagogue, slaughterhouse, and ritual baths developed in the north-western suburbs, and new churches and bridges were built.

Click on the label Wonderful-Hungary to bring up all posts on this theme.