Andrea Petö

Friction Between Communism and Zionism

[German]

Before 1944, there were 152 Jewish women's organisations in Hungary; after 1945,16 were re-founded. I found the documents of eight of them. Four organisations have two dates of their dissolution. The first date - from 1945 to 1947 - is actually very interesting because the Jewish women's organisations were dissolved, or banned, together with various conservative organisations, because there was a point in the Hungarian armistice requiring the banning of civil organisations that hadn't renewed their activity after the war, or that did not submit a request to renew their activity by a certain deadline. So in that sense, the Jewish women's organisations were packed together with the right wing organisations and were banned.

Then, surprisingly, some Jews returned from deportation and wanted to continue their activity. The second date of dissolution is 1950. In 1950, the secret police came to the offices of the Jewish women's organisations; they put what they found into boxes and took them away to a secret archive in the Ministry of Home Affairs that was reopened for the first time in 1993. That was the moment when I got access to these boxes to do research.

If you look at the demographic data of women who took part in this active Jewish life, you see that they are non-professional women, with no careers. They were mostly active in charity and redistributing aid from the Joint and UNRA and other organisations. I would say that their aim and their perspective in participating in this renewal of Jewish life was related to somehow reintegrating themselves, to reconstructing something that had been lost, to networking, to making themselves acceptable again in Hungarian life. They were members of at least three organisations: one political party, Communist or social democratic, and besides the Jewish women’s organisation the mass women’s organisation or the Zionists. Why did this world disappear by 195O? The first answer relates to the Communist takeover. They destroyed the Jewish women's organisations for two reasons. The first is religion and they identified these organisations as religious organisations. They were banned together with the Catholic, Protestant and other organisations. The other reason is related to the anti-capitalist tendencies of the Communists, because this was the well-to-do upper middle class of Jewish women who took part in the Jewish women’s organisations. Consequently they were labeled as "class enemies". So, right after they returned from the concentration camps, they were deported inside Hungary to other internment camps because of their social background. That destroyed the network basis that they had constructed very carefully and with a lot of effort after 1945. The second reason for the destructio of these organisations was Zionism. This was the very brief period in the history of Hungarian Jews when Zionism had certain deeper roots. We have police reports from 1950 saying that they did not find anybody who was previously active in these women’s organisations, because they had all left for Israel. Between these two forces, Communism and Zionism, these Jewish feminist associations disappeared, although they had hoped to reconstruct the social networks that were so important for reintegration in the Hungarian society.

Dr. Andrea Petö was born in Budapest, studied history and sociology and holds a PhD in Contemporary History.  She was an assistant professor at the Central European University, Budapest and has lectured and conducted research at other universities as well.  Her many areas of research include post-World War II Central European history, oral history, women's history, history of Jewish women, theoretical problems of gender relations, transition, and the history of communism.  She has published widely.  She serves as President of the Feminist Section of the Hungarian Sociological Association.