Who Were They? in Yad Vashem Studies, Volume 35:1

Who Were They?: Characteristics of the Religious Trends of Hungarian Jewry on the Eve of Their Extermination

The article examines the characteristics of the Jews of Hungary in 1944, based on an analysis of a special national census of the Jewish communities in Hungary. The census was carried out by the Hungarian Jewish Council in the beginning of April 1944, prior to the incarceration of the Jews into ghettos and their deportation to concentration camps. The census contains valuable data from 740 Jewish communities throughout Hungary, allowing a comparative demographic, economic, and structural analysis of the main characteristics of the Jewish communities of the three official Jewish religious trends then active in Hungary: the Neolog, the Orthodox, and the Status Quo Ante.