Kinga Frojimovics
Research Fellow (12/2013 – 08/2014)
The Relations between the Jewish Community of Pest and the Israelitische Kultusgemeinde Wien from the Anschluß until the Beginning of the Deportations, 1938-1941.
In 1938 — the year that brought the Anschluß for Austria and the first (anti-)Jewish Law for Hungary — the Jewish Community of Pest [Pesti Izraelita Hitközség, (PIH)] and the Israelitische Kultusgemeinde Wien (IKG) were the two largest Jewish communities of Central Europe. By 1938, the two Jewish communities had cultivated strong relationships with one another for over a century.
However, the nature of the relationships between the two Jewish communities had changed drastically in 1938. Until then, the typical relationships had predominantly been liturgical/ceremonial ones as well as social ties between individual members of the two communities. From 1938 onwards, as a consequence of the increasingly worsening official anti-Jewish discrimination, ties of social and legal aid had exclusively replaced any other kinds of relationships.
A systematic study of the relationships between the two largest Central European Jewish communities between 1938 and 1941 will enable us to understand how these increasingly adversely influenced central institutions of Jewish life attempted to assist their members and one another during the first phase of the Holocaust. To show how the two communities collaborated and tried to help each other is crucial, since these Jewish institutions are routinely portrayed even in historical works as isolationist bodies that were utterly uninvolved and uninterested in the problems of the Jewish world in general.
Kinga Frojimovics, historian and an archivist. From 2007, she is the director of the Hungarian Section in Yad Vashem Archives (Jerusalem, Israel). From 2010 she is also a research associate at Hadassah-Brandeis Institute, Brandeis University (Waltham, MA, USA).
Her field of research is the history of the Jews in Hungary in the nineteenth and in the twentieth centuries. She focuses on the history of the Jewish religious trends in Hungary, and on the Holocaust. She is the co-editor of the MAKOR, the Series of the Hungarian Jewish Archives (Budapest).