Zero to Hero

Viktor Orbán, a thoughtful and curious man, wanted to learn about the Jewish People, connect with the local Jewish community, and strengthen ties with the Israeli government; and Rabbi Koves (pronounced Kovesh), a longtime acquaintance, was the linchpin.

When we met last week in his office, the magnetism was hard to miss — but beneath the pleasantries, there’s a conviction that aligns with the rabbinic empire, welfare enterprises, kashrut system, and educational institutions he established almost singlehandedly.

His life story is fascinating: from zero to hero in Judaism and in the rabbinate. Born in Hungary, he is a third-generation Holocaust survivor. His parents didn’t hide his Jewish identity from him, but neither did they attribute significant importance to it.

“It wasn’t a big part of my childhood,” he says.

The world into which Shlomo Koves was born in 1979 was one devoid of Jewish identity. After the Communist takeover of Hungary following World War II, many remaining Jews — those who managed to escape the deportations and murder of 568,000 of their brethren — went into virtual hiding.

Though a large number of Jews had converted to Christianity before the war, this was different. Many people knew they were Jewish, but simply refused to acknowledge it. They lived as non-Jews and didn’t tell their children about their heritage. In part, this was because it was easier to get ahead in the Communist system as a non-Jew, but it was also because the horror of the war in Hungary had left many Jews painfully scarred.

Koves grew up in a secular home in Budapest and didn’t have much to do with Jewish life — his own parents didn’t know they were Jews until their teenage years. He remembers his grandmother regularly saying that the Holocaust proved there was no G-d.

But when he was 11 years old, the precocious Koves started to ask big questions, and as it happened, a rabbi had arrived in Hungary a year earlier to help him answer them. Rabbi Boruch Oberlander, the Brooklyn-born son of Hungarian Holocaust survivors, was the country’s first (and still enduring) Chabad shaliach. Koves began to study with Rabbi Oberlander, and soon enough, Koves had kashered part of his parents’ kitchen.

At age 12, he asked his father for an unconventional birthday gift: a bris milah. A few months later, as his bar mitzvah approached, he announced his desire to study in a yeshivah. And so at the age of 13, the future rabbi went to Israel to learn in Kfar Chabad. That was followed by yeshivah high school in Pittsburgh, yeshivah in Brunoy, France, and Crown Heights.

In 2002, after he married his Israeli-born wife, Devorah Leah, he moved back to Hungary. During this period, he became a certified sofer and mohel, and attended the University of Debrecen, receiving his PhD in the history of 19th century Hungarian Jewry. And in 2003, he became the first Orthodox rabbi to be ordained in Hungary since the Holocaust, with the participation of Israel’s Chief Rabbi Mordechai Eliyahu ztz”l; Rabbi Yitzchak Yehuda Yaroslavsky, head of the Chabad rabbinical beis din in Eretz Yisrael; and Rabbi Baruch Oberlander, Shlomo Koves’s first mentor.

Koves founded the United Hungarian Jewish Community (EMIH in Hungarian) which today operates a dozen restored shuls and Chabad Houses, several kosher restaurants, a kosher supermarket, an elementary school and high school, weekly and monthly magazines, a publishing house, a soup kitchen that provides 1,500 hot meals daily to those in need, a string of nursing homes, a private university, and a slaughterhouse for geese that provides kosher foie gras to countries around the world.

Self-Discovery

Over the years, I’ve visited many countries and met many rabbis, but Rabbi Koves’s personal history is exceptional: a local who grew up like a gentile, discovered his faith as a child, and with no resources and facing considerable resistance from his family, paved his own path to become a rabbinic leader of his country.

I asked if his parents grew closer to Judaism because of him.

“Well,” he says, “I wouldn’t say they became religious, but they did start fasting on Yom Kippur. My oldest son once asked my father — his grandfather — if he believed in G-d. ‘Until recently,’ my father told him, ‘I didn’t believe. Now I have doubts.’ ”

Rabbi Koves explains his father’s mindset. “Before the Holocaust, there were 800,000 Jews in Hungary. Jews made up five percent of the population. Budapest alone was home to 200,000 Jews, spanning the spectrum from Satmar to yoke-throwing people like Tommy Lapid, or like my grandfather, who was a Communist and went to prison. Assimilation here has been ongoing for 200 years, and my paternal grandmother actually made it her mission for her children to marry gentiles. When my father accidentally brought home a Jewish woman, she was very upset. She wanted to ensure there would never be another Holocaust and, to her thinking, this was the way to eliminate the danger.”

Every fourth person in Budapest was Jewish, although most of them had assimilated among the gentiles. In fact, the Jerusalem Post once published DNA test data conducted among citizens from dozens of countries. Hungary came out with the highest percentage of Jewish DNA outside of Israel — 15 percent of Hungarians who sent in their tests have some Jewish DNA.

When Rabbi Koves began his journey back to Judaism, he decided to undergo a private DNA test, despite Hungary’s registry system being considered highly reliable and halachically valid.

“The results came back as 99 percent Ashkenazi Jewish and 1 percent Iraqi Jewish,” he says. “I thought to myself, ‘Who was the Iraqi Jew? Maybe our forefather Avraham, who lived in southern Iraq.’ ”

Budapest’s Jewish community is unique in that, unlike neighboring countries, local Jews don’t migrate to other nearby states. They are here because their ancestors and their ancestors’ ancestors were here.

“When the Germans arrived in Hungary,” Rabbi Koves explains, “it was already the final year of the war. While in the summer of 1944, they raced to gas as many Jews as possible — 425,000 were murdered in a six-week period — transports to Auschwitz would soon cease, and as a result, part of Budapest’s Jewish community survived.

“We are the only country in Europe with an indigenous Jewish community. In Germany, most community members today originate from Russia. In France, they are Moroccan. In England, they came over from Eastern Europe. We’re the only place where the Jewish community is truly rooted.”

With Islamic extremism sidelined and anti-Semitism renounced, Hungary’s Jews are enjoying a period of grace, says Rabbi Koves. As to the energy he’s put into reviving Jewish life in a European country that saw so many of its Jews murdered in the Holocaust, Rabbi Koves points out that Jews are not being imported into Hungary. Hungarian Jewry is unique in that it’s remained local.

In Rabbi Koves’s eyes, this carries a significant responsibility, and as a native son, he sees it as a deeply personal mission. The educational, welfare, and Torah institutions he successfully established stem from a fervent belief and a profound commitment to people who grew up like his own parents did.

“People drifted away from religion,” he explains, “because they had no place where they could absorb Judaism. To me, it was unacceptable that the only official Jewish community in the country is the Neolog community of assimilated Jews. So we established our own community with institutions and services, starting from scratch.”

In 2010, when Viktor Orbán reassumed the premiership, Rabbi Koves approached him and asked him to reallocate the funding for religious institutions. Instead of the entire pot going to the Neologs, he requested support for traditional and Orthodox institutions as well.

“At the same time,” Rabbi Koves says, “I wanted to create funding sources that didn’t rely solely on philanthropy.”

Rabbi Koves decided to start with social structures as opposed to hard-core religion. He thought of taking an old building that belonged to the community and converting it into a nursing home, but somehow it never got off the ground.

“Until one day, someone told me they read in the newspaper that I was going to purchase a chain of nursing homes in Budapest. I looked at the newspaper, and sure enough, it was written there — even though no one had spoken to me about it. Two days later, the owner knocked on my door and told me he wanted to sell it to me.”

Rabbi Koves purchased the chain, which then consisted of ten branches, and he’s added a new one since. “The network now accommodates 1,600 residents,” he says. “Of them, ten percent are Jewish. They have a rabbi who teaches them Judaism and visits them regularly.”

About a year ago, he purchased Hungary’s leading aluminum factory. Both businesses serve the general population, with their revenues dedicated to the community.

“I decided to become my own philanthropist,” he says, “I acquired revenue-generating businesses to fund the institutions and meet the community’s needs.”

The Untold Story

For an Israeli like me, a grandson of Holocaust survivors, the story is easily relatable: Grandparents survived the inferno, most of the family perished, and then they came to the Holy Land and built everything anew.

The European perspective is more complex. Survivors who remained on the continent, either secular by upbringing or who had thrown off religion afterward, chose to erase their Jewish identity and assimilate. At home, their children often knew nothing about their Jewish heritage. The few who did know were unaware of its significance.

Rabbi Jonathan Megyeri, director of communications for EMIH and editor of the popular news site Neokohn, didn’t learn he was Jewish until he was nine years old, when he told his parents an anti-Jewish joke he heard in school. His parents said they don’t tell such jokes because they, in fact, are Jewish. Like Rabbi Koves, Rabbi Megyeri also eventually went off to yeshivah and received semichah before returned to his native land.

In Budapest, Rabbi Megyeri is considered a celebrity and a well-known media figure. People stop him on the street, and as we walked together near the presidential palace on our tour of the city, we encountered a Christian clergyman who enthusiastically shared that he regularly watches Rabbi Megyeri’s lectures online.

One of Hungary’s most famous “hidden” Jews is Csanád Szegedi, who had been vice-chairman of Hungary’s anti-Semitic Jobbik party before being expelled following allegations of corruption. Szegedi had been the undisputed leader of the country’s neo-Nazi right, and under his leadership, Hungary became one of Europe’s most anti-Semitic countries. His hatred of Jews and Israel was systematic and shameless.

“It’s time to say it,” he declared on national television. “It’s either them (the Jews) or us.”

Szegedi — now David — did not know he was Jewish. The revelation came during a political confrontation within his party. One of his rivals had unearthed sensational information: Szegedi’s grandmother was Jewish. Not just Jewish, but a Holocaust survivor. For years, she had concealed this “dark stain” from her children.

In the Jewish community’s periodic publication, Rabbi Koves raised a provocative question amid the uproar: Can an anti-Semitic Jew be counted in a minyan?

“It was entirely theoretical and somewhat amusing,” Rabbi Koves says. “We explained that the answer, of course, is yes. For me, the matter ended there.”

A few days later, he received a text message: “This is European Parliament member Csanád Szegedi. I’d like to speak with the rabbi.”

“I thought someone was playing a prank,” Rabbi Koves recalls. “What were the chances that Hungary’s most anti-Semitic politician would reach out to me? I told my secretary to call back and check. A few minutes later, he came back and said, ‘Rabbi, it’s really him. He wants to meet you.’ ”

At their meeting, Szegedi sought to atone and ask forgiveness from the Jewish People.

“I asked him how it was possible that he didn’t know he was Jewish — after all, his grandmother was in Auschwitz and had a tattooed number on her arm. He replied that she had always covered it with a bandage, and only now did he understand why,” Rabbi Koves relates.

Later, Szegedi decided to take her to the cemetery where her parents were buried. When they arrived, he was stunned to see her pull a small, old prayer book out of her bag.

“She never told her family she was Jewish,” Rabbi Koves says, “but she kept that one prayer book hidden for herself.”

Another incredible story happened with his Hungarian partner in the goose farming business.

“For years,” Rabbi Koves shares, “he tried to convince me to join him for a ‘deer hunt.’ I didn’t think it was appropriate for a rabbi to participate in such an event, even from the sidelines, as hunting for its own sake is assur, so I kept avoiding it. One time, the kids overheard him asking, and they began to pressure me. For them, it was an attraction, so I gave in and went. We went to the forest, I sat in a corner, and fell asleep after two minutes. They waited with the rifle for three hours and found nothing.

“When we returned to the car, my little son, who was six at the time, asked the non-Jewish partner, ‘Tell me, are you Jewish?’ It was a simple, innocent question from a little boy, but in retrospect, it turned out to be something Providential, because my partner answered, ‘No, I’m not Jewish, but my grandmother, my mother’s mother, was Jewish.’ So my son immediately told him that if that’s the case, he’s Jewish.’

“I said to my kids, ‘You see? When a rabbi goes hunting, he doesn’t find deer, but he finds Jews.’ ”

Returning Light

A ten-minute walk from the Hungarian parliament building in Budapest’s 13th district, an high-end neighborhood with several thousand Jews — among them judges, top lawyers, senior doctors, and more, most of them assimilated.

Here Rabbi Koves dedicated a magnificent, multipurpose building that is stunning in its beauty, with a shul at its center. In the adjoining halls are a Hungarian-language library, a community club, study rooms, a mehudar mikveh, a large play area for the children, a spacious conference hall, and an exclusive café.

The local rabbi, Rabbi Shmuel Glitzenstein, who moved with his wife, Shoshi, from Israel in 2009, welcomes me warmly.

“Hungarian Jewry,” he says, “lost thousands of young people, and we’re talking about after the Holocaust. Do you know why? Because the young people never felt part of whatever remained of the shuls, which were neglected, small, without anything to attract them. Everything revolved around the Holocaust, and the message received by the second generation was very bleak. Many distanced themselves because of this or refused to come close.

“While the memory of the Holocaust must be preserved,” Rabbi Glitzenstein continues, “especially as on the nearby bridge, Jews were thrown into the river, the question is how we do this while reaching out to a new generation. Today, many young people come to us primarily because they’ve heard that it’s an experience. In the end, though, they even bring their parents, some of whom have a bris at the age of 40 or 50.”

A few months back, Rabbi Glitzenstein received a call from a Christian teacher who was teaching her students about various religions and wanted to show them what a Jewish synagogue looks like.

“I know that in every non-Jewish school, there are also Jews,” Rabbi Glitzenstein says. “In general, our approach is to make Judaism accessible even to non-Jews, because it reduces the level of anti-Semitism on one hand, and you never know who’s really Jewish. I told her she’s welcome to visit, and I spoke for about an hour while the group sat in the shul. In the course of my talk, I told them, ‘I’m sure there are some Jewish children here.’ Three of them raised their hands.”

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1943)