Imagine growing up in a society where religion is not important. And then imagine living where you knew that half of the Jewish population of your country had been murdered during the Holocaust. And then imagine that your country had emerged from communism around the time of your birth, and that remnants of it were still common and plentiful. And then imagine finding out you were Jewish: it was your relatives who were murdered and your relatives who were not allowed to practice their religion. This is the reality for the Jews of Budapest, Hungary.

Dayton Partnership With Israel Chair Irvin Moscowitz meets with young adults from Budapest’s Jewish community

Partnership with Israel — a consortium of Jewish federations in the central United States to foster relationships with Israelis — is now linked to Budapest, Hungary. Our consortium has always been a leader and innovator among the  50-plus Partnerships with Israel worldwide. The Jewish Agency for Israel approached our consortium with a challenge: Hungary has a huge Jewish identity problem. Not only are people leaving Judaism, many there don’t even know they are Jewish.

Our charge is to fortify Jewish identity there. Unable to join a Partnership mission to Budapest in June, my wife, Gayle, and I visited in August.

Eran El Bar, emissary to Budapest for the Jewish Agency, and Gabor Balazs, also with the Jewish Agency, showed us the Jewish section of the city. During World War II, more than 140,000 Jews from Hungary were killed. We saw the largest synagogue in Europe — the second largest in the world — refurbished in part by the foundations of Tony Curtis and Estée Lauder, both of Jewish Hungarian background. There is a courtyard on the property with grave markers lying around, leaning against walls, trees and benches. This was a mass grave from the winter of 1944-45 where thousands of people from the Jewish ghetto died during a bleak winter.

We saw activities in which Jewish youths are reminded of their heritage, programs run by the Jewish Agency to help bring them back. We saw advertisements for a Jewish cultural week, and photographs of Israel enlarged and displayed in a park. These photographs were taken by Jewish youths who have been to Israel. This park is about 600 feet from the birthplace of Theodor Herzl.

Zsuzsa Somogyi, a young woman, told us she was from a small city in Hungary. When she was 14, she found a Hebrew Bible on the bookshelf of her home. She thought the Jewish religion was interesting and told her parents she thought she might like to convert.

They told her she was already Jewish.

We met four young men: Benedek Kurdi, Tamas Buechler, Adam Zeitler and Dani Lederer. Tamas, a law student, said he was brought up Jewish. He told us his parents had to get married in hiding because Jewish ceremonies were illegal.

Others told us they didn’t know they were Jewish until they were teenagers. These young people have visited Israel with Birthright programs and volunteered teaching children in a summer camp in the Western Galilee, our Partnership region.

When we met them, some of them had just come back and were totally in love with Israel, being Jewish, and the concept of volunteering, which was foreign to them.

Our Central Region Consortium of Partnership with Israel has begun developing programs involving Budapest, the Western Galilee and our consortium communities. This summer, a group of Israeli children spent time in a summer camp in Budapest with children of the same age. Groups of young adults from Hungary continue to visit Israel through Birthright and Taglit programs.

This is just the beginning. As these programs develop, we hope that more people will get involved. Imagine: being part of an effort to help restore a Jewish community devastated by the Holocaust and then forced underground by communism. It is an exciting and important venture, and we are now part of it.

Irvin Moscowitz is chair of Dayton’s Partnership With Israel.