Horváth László szerk.: Mátrai Tanulmányok (Gyöngyös, 1999)

decided that they would not tolerate Jews in the Club any more; many Jewish athletes had to leave. In 1925, Jews were expelled from the Gyöngyös Casino Association by 'race-protectors', in spite of the fact that it was mainly their membership dues that maintained the Association financially. The split has also occured in the social life. Such tensions and the open anti-Semitism in the town naturally contributed the to decrease in the number of Israelites in Gyöngyös. According to the 1920 census, 2250 out in 19715 people were Israelites, while in 1930 only 2136 out of the 21 281 population. If we consider that following the war quite a few families arrived from within the pre-Trianon boundaries and from the areas of the former Monarchy, the dwindling of the original Gyöngyös Jewish community is well understood. Their definitive economic role, however, stayed unbroken; as a consequence, from 1938 three laws were passed attempting to make this impossible, following the German model. In 1938, the First Anti-Jewish Law tried to maximise their proportion at 20% in the intellectual and the free jobs. Germanophile politics and the ground gained by of the right wing boosted the preparation of the Second Anti-Jewish Law at the beginning of 1939. The 1939 4th article, 'On the Limitation of the Jewish Extension in Social and Economic Life' came into force on 5 May. This, contrary to the previous 20% limitation, lowered the maximum proportion in intellectual jobs to 6 %, beside re-establishing the Numerus Clausus. The law totally excluded Jews from public service jobs and limited their employment in free intellectual and office jobs. In comparison to the previous law, the definition of 'Jewish' was placed on racial foundation, proclaiming anybody Jewish, if one parent or two grandparents were, or had been, member(s) of the Israelite denomination. The goal of this law was to eliminate Jewish presence in the leading positions of economic life, but even contemporaries found it a two-edged weapon. There were attempts to remove skilled experts and leading personnel at a time when the economy was booming but this could not be accomplished without endangering the success of the armament program and one economic plans. This explains why the dismissals were only moderately executed in certain jobs and why the expropriation of factories started later. The Third Anti-Jewish Law was prepared continually from the spring of 1941. This is the 1941 15th article, 'Complement and Modification of the 1894 31st article On the Marriage Rights and the Needed Race-protective Regulations Connected to this'. While the two previous laws attacked the economic positions of the Jews, this wanted to eliminate social and personal contact between the Jewish and the non-Jewish, prohibiting not only marriage but also extramarital sexual relationship between them. The first deportations started parallel to the first appearance of this law: in the August of 1941 the Hungarian authorities began to round up Jews who could not present a certificate of citizenship. Already in those days 35 000 Jews, deported from Hungary, were killed by the Nazis in Ukraine and Galicia (in Kamenec-Podolsk alone 13 000 people died who sought refuge in Hungary).