The Long Twentieth-Century of the Hebrew-Hungarian Siddur (Jewish Prayer Book) of Hungarian Jews (Accepted)

Type of Abstract (select):

Abstract (max. 250 words):
In the period that can now be called the long twentieth-century, meaning between the 1860s and the 1990s, the Jews of Hungary have lived through periods of acceptance and rejection by Hungarian society and leadership, going through Emancipation and assimilation, two World Wars, anti-Semitism culminating in genocide, Soviet-imposed communism and finally the present regime. Hungarian Jews of the modern era were far from a monolithic group, but since the 1867 Emancipation they became divided between the Orthodox, who largely rejected modernization, and the Neologs, who embraced it (in between them was a small group called Status Quo Ante). In the decades leading from the 1860s to the 1940s the Orthodox communities decreased, whereas the Neolog ones increased and this tendency became perpetuated after the Holocaust and under communism (little is known of Jews who converted to Christianity or became atheist or otherwise lost contact with Judaism). This presentation offers a close comparison between two editions of a major text of Neolog Hungarian Jews, namely their bi-lingual Hebrew-Hungarian prayer book or siddur. The first was created in the late nineteenth-century and used throughout most of the twentieth-century, and the second appeared in the 1990s and since then replaced the older edition. This comparison will focus on parts of the prayer book that refer to the life of Jews in their host countries including Hungary of the long twentieth-century.


Brief Professional Bio (max. 100 words):
Prof. Ilana Rosen of the Dept. of Hebrew Literature at the Ben Gurion University of the Negev is a researcher of folk and documentary literature of Jews and Israelis in the twentieth century. She has written five books and over forty articles on these topics. Her last study, Pioneers in Practice – an Analysis of Documentary Literature by Veteran Residents of the Israeli South, was published in 2016 by the Ben Gurion Institute for the Study of Israel and Zionism. As of 2013 she is the Book Review Editor of Hungarian Cultural Studies, published by the University of Pittsburgh.