Hungarian Jewish Archives
Budapest, Hungary

January, 2014

In January 2014 Memory Project founders Roz Jacobs and Laurie Weisman traveled to Budapest, Hungary to launch The Memory Project exhibit and workshops at the Hungarian Jewish Archives. To make the workshop more meaningful to the participants there, 16 Hungarian subjects were added to the Memory Project photo archives. They were selected by our partners at the Archives and the Zachor Foundation for Social Remembrance and include Jewish, homosexual and Roma victims of the Holocaust. We received the translation of their stories from Hungarian into English so we could post them on our website. You can view them in the Subject Gallery.

 It is still not easy to be a Jew in Hungary. We felt that strongly from the people who came to The Memory Project exhibit. The exhibit always provokes emotions, but theirs seemed more intense. András Heisler, the head of the Jewish community in Hungary gave a moving speech at the opening. He said this exhibit is a critical contribution to telling the human story of what happened to the Hungarian Jews in the Holocaust—a story that the current Hungarian government is trying to suppress. The rebirth of Jewish culture in Hungary honors the memory of those who fought, those who lost their lives, and those who survived.

Student Reflections

“It was interesting because I later realized that I wasn’t looking at the photo as if it was about a stranger but about a person I had some important previous knowledge about.”

“I will remember that everybody get close to the person who he/she draw.”

“I liked that we could approach drawing from a different aspect, while we could get to know or get close to a stranger.”

“It was a strange feeling that with the help of the photo I tried to make personal contact with somebody who I don’t know and I haven’t even met before.”