Riczu Zoltán: Zsidó épületek és emlékek Nyíregyházán. (A Nyíregyházi Jósa András Múzeum kiadványai 34. Nyíregyháza, 1992)

Jewish Relics and Buildings in Nyíregyháza Jews in Nyíregyháza — a Brief Introduction After the Turkish conquerors were driven out of Hungary, hardly any Jews were left in the country. Pockets of small communities survived in the Northern and Western parts of Hungary. The first Jewish immigrants to Hungary arrived from Austro-German territories and Bohemia. A third great wave of immigrants came from Galícia. At the time that Poland ceased to be an independent state, and its territory was shared by its neighbours, Galicia was ceded to Austria (1772). As it thus became part of the Austrian Empire, migration to other parts of the Empire was easier for the Galician population. These people first settled down mostly in the Northern and North-Eastern parts of the country. Later on they gradually moved towards the Western and Southern parts as well. At the same time the Jewish living in the Western territories migrated Eastward. The two major Jewish groups soon got into contact with each other. It was, however, possible to observe three important differences between these two groups: A) The Jews already living here were richer and had developed a bourgeois mentality, many of them having risen into the middle class. Whereas those that had arrived later from Galicia came from a feudal background. The tension between these two groups was clearly shown by the elections within the religious community in 1864. Those who came from the former Polish territories maintained an active contact with their country of origin and were reluctant to give up their old customs and national costumes. This group was the core of what later came to be called Orthodoxia, the people desperate to keep to their old religious and social traditions. B) The Hassid branch was also present in the country. This branch came into being in Podolia in the middle of the 18th century, and they represented a naive-mystical trend as opposed to Rabbinism. 129 I