Magyarországi Zsidó Hitközségek 1944. április

Függelék

Jewish Communities in Hungary April, 1944 Data from a Census Organized by the Central Council of Hungarian Jews on the Order of German Authorities Part I The Evidence Editor-in-chief: Joseph Schweitzer Edited by Kinga Frojimovics Computer programming organized by Gábor Zólyomi With an Appendix: Territorial structure of Jewish communities' organization in Hungary according to the official lists of districts, etc., 1868-1950, published by Kinga Frojimovics Summary Back in the early 1980s, György Landeszman, then director of the Hungarian Jewish Archive (Magyar Zsidó Levéltár), Budapest, discovered in the building of the Rabbinical Seminary (Jewish Theological Seminary / Országos Rabbiképző Intézet) a large number of file cards kept in two metal chests which had not been opened since, perhaps, World War II.

1 The 23 by 26 cm cards turned out to be questionnaries or forms filled out by Jewish communities (hitközség) in Hungary. They give detailed information on the number of members, rabbis and leadership, the schools, institutions, foundations, the financial situation, etc., of the community in question. The forms were dated from a very narrow period of time: the days between April 9 and 12, 1944. All came from places within the borders of the Hungarian Kingdom as they ran Spring, 1944, that is, after changes in 1938-1941 ("Greater Hungary") and later on in consequence of the ongoing war. After a preliminary investigation, György Landeszman and Joseph Schweitzer, director of the Rabbinical Seminary, have identified the files as the archive from the census of Jewish communities organized by the Central Council of Hungarian Jews (Magyar Zsidók Központi Tanácsa) / Jewish Council (Zsidó Tanács or Judenrat) on the order of German authorities a few weeks after the German occupation of Hungary (March 19, 1944), and just a few weeks before the mass deportation of Hungarian Jews started (May 15, 1944). As far as the editors of the present volume can see, the German military authorities or the Gestapo's special units nowhere else ordered, and the Judenrats nowhere else accomplished, a similar overall census of Jewish communities and of their wealth. Some of the German and local police or secret police surveys are well attested in documentary evidence. In one of the letters published in the present volume (as no. 22 in the Appendix to the Introduction), the officials of a Jewish community in a village in Sub-Carpathia (Kárpátalja) complain that in their village, during Easter days (?) ordered to submit a complete list of Jews living there. There are in scholarly publications on the Holocaust or in memoires short references to the fact that „(in Hungary) the Gestapo moved into hundreds of Hungarian towns and villages, prepared a list of all Jewish wealth in each town" (quoted from Martin Gilbert, The Holocaust

, 1986, Fontana Paperbacks, 1987, p. 662), etc. This and similar informations notwithstanding, the present conscription's case seems to be different. It was a census of communities, not of persons, and it was organized not by the Germans or Hungarians, but — on German order — by the Jewish authorities. As Eichmann himself testified, in case of Hungary the Germans preferred to have the Hungarians carry out the operation themselves. „Over the years, I 1 From March 19, 1944, the day of German occupation of Hungary, until the liberation of Pest by the Russian army on January 18, 1945 the building of the Rabbinical Seminary was under German conrol being used as a temporary concentration camp for prominent Jews. 884