Today, although there has not been another representative survey since the 2017 study, Surányi said at least some people in the Jewish community “say that they would vote for Orbán just because he is supporting Netanyahu and Israel,” a position that was essentially unheard of in 2017. She said the origins of the shift are complex, stemming from the xenophobia and Islamophobia present across Hungarian society and coming after a decade during which “Orbán has been pressing this moral panic button” against migrants. “I think it got to the Jewish head,” she said. The new prominence of the conservative and often Fidesz-aligned Chabad movement, which has grown rapidly in Hungary, has also played a part. Ultimately, in light of the personal friendship that blossomed between Orbán and Netanyahu after the first visit, some Jews may have begun to associate support for the Hungarian leader with support for Israel. October 7th has only exacerbated such attachments: Surányi—whose own research focuses in part on the severely unbalanced discourse around Israel in Hungarian Jewish media—characterized the mainstream communal attitude as “How can you criticize Israel after it was attacked?”
Despite this apparent rightward shift, many Hungarian Jews still disagree with both the community’s support for Israel and MAZSIHISZ’s conciliatory turn toward the Hungarian government. In the August petition, signatories—including parliament member András Jámbor, Holocaust historian László Karsai, and Canadian Hungarian doctor Gábor Máté—expressed their solidarity with both “the Jewish victims of the attacks of October 7th and the innocent Palestinian victims in Gaza,” and criticized Hungarian Jewish institutions and the government for suppressing open discourse around Israel. “There is barely any platform or institution which would dare to take on these debates and nuanced conversations,” they wrote. “In fact, in recent months they have actively cancelled invitations to Jewish representatives who do not represent the point of view of the radical Israeli government.”
Anna Margit, a Berlin-based activist who grew up in the heart of Budapest’s Jewish Quarter and has returned frequently to the city in recent months to host Jewish anti-Zionist events, said she has noticed a growing anti-Zionist sentiment within the Jewish community, especially among young people. But few of these anti-Zionists, Margit said, feel represented by Jewish institutions like MAZSIHISZ. In Hungary, she said, “It feels like Zionism is the only world for Jews, the only planet. If people exit Zionism, it feels like walking off the face of the earth.” Days after the petition was released, the editor of Szombat, the largest Jewish publication in Hungary, published an article decrying the signatories for lacking self-reflection and accusing them of “not breaking the silence, but rather joining a ceaselessly and ever more aggressively howling chorus.”
There are also structural reasons why Jewish institutions may be disinclined to break with the government. Attila Novák, a historian who studies the Holocaust and Zionist movements in Hungary and East-Central Europe, explained that unlike Jewish congregations in other countries which rely on contributions or membership dues, Hungarian synagogues get most of their funding through MAZSIHISZ, which in turn receives general state funding to maintain its network of Jewish hospitals, schools, and nursing homes, as well as government compensation for religious properties illegally confiscated by the communist regime. It also makes its own income from tourism to Jewish sites. Together, nearly the entire MAZSIHISZ budget comes from those three sources, in roughly equal proportion, rendering the relationship with the government critically important. “If the state doesn’t give money, then there’s no money,” said Novák. “They can’t pay the rabbis and they can’t clean the synagogues.” While government social service funds and historical property compensation are theoretically guaranteed year over year—one reason why former president Heisler says that he didn’t see the federation as particularly dependent on the government—additional money for new projects and much-needed renovations relies on a good relationship with the state.
At the congregation level, rabbis say they face pressure from MAZSIHISZ to avoid any controversy that could endanger this funding. One rabbi was briefly expelled from the federation and fired in 2020 for Facebook posts critical of Israel. Another, who asked that his name be withheld to avoid consequences for him or his synagogue, said that funding from MAZSIHISZ makes up more than half of the budget of his congregation, which is one of Budapest’s most progressive and is split on the issue of support for Israel and Zionism. “There is dependency, and not just a small amount of dependency, on MAZSIHISZ and through them on the government too,” he said.
Even the most independent third of the MAZSIHISZ budget, tourism money, has become ever more intertwined with the state as the Hungarian government has zeroed in on international visitors to prop up a struggling economy. Budapest’s Jewish Quarter, home to a triangle of restored synagogues, is a prime attraction, one heavily promoted in government tourism materials. Once the site of the Budapest Ghetto, the neighborhood experienced decades of decay before becoming famous in the 2000s for its “ruin bars” built into run-down apartment buildings. With the emergence of Airbnb and budget airlines, millions now visit the neighborhood yearly and contribute heavily to the tourism revenues, which represent more than 13% of Hungary’s GDP. In response to the ensuing quality-of-life issues for local residents, the local government has laid out a plan to shift from party tourism to cultural tourism, especially Jewish-themed cultural tourism, which is useful both materially and symbolically to the government. Orbán uses this visibly Jewish neighborhood to bolster his claim that “Hungary is the safest country for the Jewish community,” thanks to his anti-migration policies that prevent the influence of “radical Islam.” Meanwhile, several of the restaurants and hotels in the Jewish Quarter are owned by members of Orbán’s patronage network, the NER group.
Jewish organizations stand to benefit, too. MAZSIHISZ vice president Mester specifically mentioned to Jewish Currents his appreciation for the Orbán government’s “programs and initiatives to preserve Jewish cultural heritage and support community life,” including renovations of synagogues and memorials. One of the three famous temples, the Rumbach Street Synagogue, was recently renovated by MAZSIHISZ using a grant of 3.2 billion forints (then equivalent to more than $11 million) from the government. MAZSIHISZ also manages the synagogue on Dohány Street, the largest in Europe, which, according to the director of the MAZSIHISZ tourism office, draws more than half a million international visitors a year willing to pay its steep ticket prices. Still, the investments have done little to bring back the quarter’s tight-knit Hungarian Jewish community, which mostly fled with the tourism boom. Büchler, the MAZSIHISZ governing board member, is also part-owner of a small artisan Judaica shop in the neighborhood. While the owners hope to revive some of the Hungarian Jewish life and material culture that once flourished here, he admitted that 95% of the customers are tourists and compared the situation in the neighborhood to “living in a kind of Shoah Disneyland.”
Hungary’s Jewish community, unique among its neighbors in that many educated urban Jews survived the Holocaust in Budapest, has a long history of adaptation and survival under illiberal and repressive governments. In this light, perhaps the current political shift is more a return to the norm than a new development. According to Novák, apart from Heisler’s tenure and a few clashes over antisemitism in the chaos of the post-socialist ’90s, MAZSIHISZ has never been a body that strongly criticized the government. For some, the risk of getting on Orbán’s bad side as a tiny minority community remains too great.
Another rabbi, who leads a MAZSIHISZ-affiliated congregation and also requested that his name be withheld, summed up the choices facing the Jewish institution in terms of pragmatism. “If I am Jewish, and I want to be here in Hungary for another hundred years and not leave, and the Hungarian people cannot vote out the Fidesz government for four consecutive terms, do I have to play the role of opposition instead of the Hungarian people?” he said. “Why would we play this role? Our job is to maintain our communities.” As a result, it’s been left to Hungarian Jews organizing outside institutional religious frameworks to mount an opposition both to Orbán’s rule and to Zionism. That context led Margit, the Berlin-based activist, to realize her voice was needed in the Jewish community back home: “I should be trying to do something in Hungary. Because I think there are a lot of people who are anti-Zionist Jews, but who don’t dare to say anything because they all think they are alone.”