A berettyóújfalui zsidóság a második világháború után

Abstract

The elaborations of the history of rural Jewry in general can be claimed to be clearly defined by the Holocaust. The property and partly legal retaliation of the pre-Soa period, followed by the return, resumption, and disappearance of the surviving Jewry from the rural society, is usually only briefly mentioned in the works written about it, as an aftertaste of the events of the emergency. In this study, I present these less researched resources of the disappearance of the Jews from Berettyóújfalu, comparing it with another Hajdú-Bihar county town, Hajdúnánás. At the end of the war, a small number of local Jews returned home deprived of their families. A few tried to restart their lives in Berettyóújfalu, but there were others who never returned to their birthplace. Some of them tried to reorganize their lives in the land of their ancestors, then called Palestine, later Israel. In my study, I am talking about the vicissitudes of those who stayed for a while in the hope of a new beginning, but later, having experienced the communist dictatorship, left.