Balassagyarmat

On the Hungarian bank of the Ipoly (Ipeľ), at the heart of Nógrád County and at the foot of the Cserhát hills, Balassagyarmat was for a long time one of the oldest and most prestigious centers of Hungarian Judaism. The town, which remained the county seat until 1950 and which prides itself on the title of Civitas Fortissima ("the bravest town"), was home for two centuries to a Jewish community whose demographic density was exceptional: in the nineteenth century, 40% of the population of Balassagyarmat was Jewish. According to the community's own tradition, the Jewish community of Balassagyarmat is one of the oldest diasporas in Hungary, its past stretching back some six hundred years.

This Great Book sets out to retrace, from its documented origins to its annihilation and its fragile survival, the history of a community that was at once a foremost center of rabbinic orthodoxy and an actor in the civic life of the county. It draws on the standard encyclopedic entries, on the works of the historiography of the Hungarian Shoah, and on the memory preserved by the present-day community and by its museum. Where archive and tradition meet, we shall indicate it; where uncertainty remains, we shall name it.

The enduring rootedness of Judaism in Balassagyarmat is attested as early as the first half of the eighteenth century. The Jewish community was organized in 1730, and its Chevra Kadisha — the burial society — in 1742. This chronology places Balassagyarmat among the oldest institutionally structured Jewish settlements of royal Hungary, at a time when the settlement of Jews in the towns of Nógrád county was developing under the protection of the great noble families, among them the Balassa, who gave the place its name.

From the outset, the community endowed itself with a rabbinate of high standing. Among the rabbis who served the community were Judah Leb Engel (from 1730) and Benjamin Zeev Wolf Boskowitz. The rapidity of demographic growth is one of the salient features of this early period: according to the present-day community, its numbers began to grow rapidly from the middle of the eighteenth century. It was likewise from the middle of the eighteenth century that a famous yeshiva operated in Balassagyarmat, making the town a center of Talmudic study whose influence radiated across all of northern Hungary.

The social physiognomy of this nascent community was at first mercantile. The community consisted at the outset chiefly of merchants, traders, and intermediaries who took advantage of Balassagyarmat's position as a commercial crossroads and the administrative center of the county.

The most remarkable feature of the Jewish organization of Balassagyarmat was its legal and administrative autonomy. The community formed, according to its own archives, a "county" or autonomous body distinct from the municipal administration. The Jewish community of Balassagyarmat constituted an "autonomous community" independent of municipal administration and justice; the autonomous "Jewish council," placed under the leadership of the rabbinate, was composed of two "prosecutors," two "judges" (dayan), and seven councillors.

The sources agree on the extent of these prerogatives. The Jews of the town had their own independent community, which was not part of the town's judicial and administrative system; they had their own council, led by the rabbi and composed of two prosecutors, two judges (dayan), and seven councillors, exercising their authority over the disputes and internal affairs of the Jewish citizens. This internal jurisdiction could even extend beyond the strict communal framework: the council assisted local authorities in cases where not all parties were Jewish, but where at least one was.

This organization, inherited from the corporate law of the Ancien Régime, made the community of Balassagyarmat a true institution within an institution, managing its religious, educational, and judicial life with an independence that few Hungarian diasporas knew to such a degree.

The spiritual history of Balassagyarmat is inseparable from the great Orthodox tradition stemming from the school of the Hatam Sofer of Presbourg (Bratislava). At the turn of the mid-nineteenth century, when the construction of a new synagogue was paralyzed by internal dissension, a decisive rabbinic figure took the helm of the community. It was at this time that Aron David Deutsch became chief rabbi of the community, he who had been the most cherished disciple of the Hatam Sofer, the rabbi of Presbourg.

His authority made it possible to overcome the quarrels that were undermining the community. A rabbi with a firm hand, Aron David Deutsch restored order in a community exhausted by tensions and internal antagonisms, and presided over the consolidation of religious life at the very moment when Hungary was preparing to divide its Jewry between the Orthodox and Neolog currents after the congress of 1868-1869. Balassagyarmat resolutely aligned itself with the Orthodox camp, faithful to the legacy of the yeshiva founded a century earlier.

The dynastic continuity of this rabbinate is attested right up to the eve of the catastrophe: at the time of the German occupation, the Orthodox congregation numbered 1,516 members, led by president Mihály Lázár and rabbi David Deutsch — heir to the name and office of the illustrious disciple of the Hatam Sofer.

The emancipation law of 1867-1868 opened for the community an era of integration and prosperity. The original merchant structure gave way to a presence in every sector of urban life. After the promulgation of the "emancipation law" in 1868, Jews gradually began to appear in all aspects of the town's life — in the social, cultural, and economic spheres — Balassagyarmat being then the county seat.

It was in this context that the great synagogue was completed, an emblematic monument of the communal golden age. The community's first synagogue had been destroyed by fire in 1776; on its site, a new synagogue was built in 1868. This building attained considerable regional renown. It was a masterpiece, one of the most important Orthodox Jewish synagogues of Eastern Europe, built in an arabesque style and endowed with double upper galleries. Communal memory holds it to be one of the largest on the continent: there once stood the second-largest Orthodox synagogue in Central Europe, able to accommodate 4,000 people.

The closeness to power is illustrated by an episode preserved in local memory and materialized by a marble plaque exhibited today in the museum. This particular piece, originally placed at the entrance of the synagogue, bears in Hebrew and Hungarian the words addressed by Franz Joseph to the delegates of the Jewish community of the county during an audience held in 1894, in which the sovereign declared that he received with gratitude the homage and the assurance of fidelity of the Israelite community of Nógrád county, and that the difference of religion raised no partition in his heart.

The German occupation of Hungary on 19 March 1944 sealed the community's fate. The machinery of deportation descended upon the Hungarian provinces in the spring and summer of 1944: from 15 May to 9 July 1944, officials of the Hungarian gendarmerie, under the direction of the German SS, deported roughly 440,000 Jews from Hungary, most of them to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where, upon arrival and after selection, the majority were killed in the gas chambers.

In Balassagyarmat, the course of the persecution is precisely documented. The Jews were gathered at the beginning of May 1944 under the direction of mayor Béla Vannay. The town served as a regional concentration centre: Balassagyarmat was an important centre of concentration and embarkation for the 5,820 Jews rounded up in Nógrád county. The population was divided into two sectors: the roughly 2,000 local Jews were concentrated in the "large ghetto," in and around Kossuth Lajos, Thököly, and Hunyadi streets, while the Jews brought in from the neighbouring towns and villages of Nógrád county were gathered in the "small ghetto," located on Óváros square. Among the localities whose Jews were thus deported were Alsópetény, Apátújfalu, Becske, Bercel, Cserháthaláp, Diósjenő, Érsekvadkert, Galgaguta, Hugyag, Losonc, Nógrádmarcal, Őrhalom, Szécsény, Szügy, and several other places.

The final stage shortly preceded the extermination. Just before their deportation, the Jews were moved into the tobacco-drying barns of Nyírjespuszta, about five kilometres from the town. Then came the deportation: the Jews were deported to Auschwitz in two transports that left Nyírjespuszta on 12 and 14 June. The very monument of the golden age was desecrated and then annihilated: the Germans used the synagogue as a munitions depot and destroyed it before their departure. Local memory specifies the date of this destruction: the Nazis used it as a warehouse during the Second World War and blew it up as they left the town, on 9 December 1944.

Of the flourishing pre-war community, only a tiny remnant survived. After the Shoah, only 136 people returned to the town. The first to reappear were those who had escaped the transports: among the first survivors to come back were the men of the forced labour battalions.

These survivors attempted to rebuild the community. Together with the concentration camp survivors who returned in 1945-1946, they reorganized the community under the leadership of Rabbi Pinkász Kálmán. But the reconstruction was short-lived, thwarted by the political context of communist Hungary and by emigration. Jews began to leave the town after 1948, and especially after the Hungarian Revolution of 1956; by 1970, only a handful of Jews remained in Balassagyarmat.

Today, it is essentially memory that perpetuates the Jewish presence. A small museum, devoted to local Jewish history and traditions, was established in 2000 and housed in the former Chevra Kadisha, a small building with a pointed roof and a red and white façade. The synagogue, for its part, lives on in the town's memory: a striking historic building survives as one of the most tangible reminders of the town's Jewish heritage.

The Jewish history of Balassagyarmat condenses into two centuries the destiny of provincial Hungarian Judaism: an early and structured settlement as far back as 1730, a remarkable corporate autonomy, a first-rank Orthodox rabbinate stemming from the school of the Hatam Sofer, a civic integration following the emancipation of 1868, then the annihilation of 1944 and the slow extinction of the postwar years. The strength of this community lay in its density — nearly 40% of the population in the nineteenth century — and in its religious influence, symbolized by one of the largest Orthodox synagogues in Central Europe, reduced to ashes in December 1944.

What remains now belongs to memory and heritage: a museum housed in the former burial confraternity, a surviving synagogal building, plaques and names. The Great Book of Balassagyarmat is thus that of a vanished grandeur, of which both archive and tradition agree that it was, among the Hungarian diasporas, one of the oldest and most faithful to itself.