Abstract: Based on published primary and secondary materials and oral interviews with some eighty communal and organizational leaders, experts and scholars, this book provides a comparative account of the reconstruction of Jewish communal life in both Germany and in Austria (where 98% live in the capital, Vienna) after 1945. The author explains the process of reconstruction over the next six decades, and its results in each country.
The monograph focuses on the variety of prevailing perceptions about topics such as: the state of Israel, one’s relationship to the country of residence, the Jewish religion, the aftermath of the Holocaust, and the influx of post-soviet immigrants. Cohen-Weisz examines the changes in Jewish group identity and its impact on the development of communities. The study analyzes the similarities and differences in regard to the political, social, institutional and identity developments within the two countries, and their changing attitudes and relationships with surrounding societies; it seeks to show the evolution of these two country’s Jewish communities in diverse national political circumstances and varying post-war governmental policies.
Abstract: Under democracy in Hungary, Jews developed new identity strategies, but their choices of strategy were clearly dependent on earlier identities and the extent to which they had moved away from traditional Jewishness.
Today in Hungary, one end of the spectrum is filled by groups that continue to observe strictly Jewish religious traditions. At the other end of the spectrum, there are those for whom Jewish background is at most a fact of origin stored in the backroom of family memory and possessing no
public significance and little personal relevance. The majority Of Jews living in the country are to be found somewhere between the two extremes. The content of their identity may be the preservation of tradition at some level or other, or it may be a secular or ethnic-national consciousness of identity, or it may even be the preserving of the memory of forebears, ties With Jewish culture, or the feeling of being at home and of protection in a Jewish environment within Hungarian
society.
Jews who preserve traditions are clearly following the strategy of acceptance, while those at the other end of the spectrum have chosen the strategy of rejection, Between the two extremes, both strategies are present, and positions are dynamic: in this group it is possible to observe strategies providing a release from the stigma of the Jews as well as strategies providing a rescue from the stigma. Often these strategies are employed alternately by successive generations.
