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Centropa in Hungary

Although less than 40,000 Jews are officially registered, experts estimate there are between 80,000 to 100,000 Jews in Budapest today, making it the largest and liveliest community in Central Europe. Three day schools, more than a dozen functioning synagogues, and a half dozen youth clubs are all well attended.

All our Hungarian interviews were conducted in Budapest. That's because the overwhelming majority of Jews in the provinces were deported to their deaths in 1944. Most of those who returned to Hungary chose to settle in Budapest, so there was little reason for us to work in Szeged, Debrecen and other cities.

We also conducted Hungarian-language interviews in Novi Sad and Subotica in Serbia, in southern Slovakia and in Transylvania in Romania. Elderly Jews in these communities still speak Hungarian as their mother tongue.

Centropa's interview methodology was created by Eszter Andor and Dora Sardi, who headed a team of nearly a dozen interviewers, editors, transcribers, transcribers and scanners. Together, they secured more than 200 interviews and digitized 5,000 pictures.

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Centropa in Ukraine

Our largest and most comprehensive project. In total, we interviewed 264 elderly Jews and digitized 2,944 of their family pictures and personal documents.

Centropa’s interviews in Ukraine were carried out between 2001 and 2006 under the guidance of Professor Leonid Finberg, director of the Institute of Jewish Studies in Kiev. Marina Karelstein worked as our coordinator, and Ella Levitskaya, Ella Orlikova and Zhanna Litinskaya were among our most productive interviewers.

Ukraine is an enormous country and the pre-Holocaust Jewish experience quite varied: from Jews born in interbellum Romania (Czernovitz) to interbellum Poland (Lvov), as well as Jews who had been born in shtetls and small towns in the east of the country and in the Black Sea port of Odessa, where most of our interviews were conducted by Natalia Fomina.

Centropa’s interviews in Ukraine were underwritten by The Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, The Jack Buncher Family Foundation, The Rich Foundation for Education and Welfare, The Austrian Federal Ministry of Culture, Art, and Education.

Centropa in Ukraine

Our largest and most comprehensive project. In total, we interviewed 264 elderly Jews and digitized 2,944 of their family pictures and personal documents.

Centropa in Slovakia

This Jewish community, devastated by the Nazis, was further depleted during the Communist decades. The few remaining Jews live primarily in Bratislava and Kosice.

Slovak Jews, many of whom speak Hungarian as their mother tongue, are more traditional than their Czech counterparts. While few are religious today, many of them grew up in deeply religious homes, and their biographies reflect this.

Less than 3,000 Jews live in Slovakia today but their positions in intellectual circles-in universities and teaching hospitals-casts a much larger shadow.

Our interviews in Slovakia are spearheaded by Dr Martin Korcok. Martin lectures frequently on Jewish culture, is employed as a curator at the Slovak Jewish Museum, and is a member of the International Task Force on Holocaust Education.

Centropa in Romania

800,000 Jews lived in interwar Romania, which then included all of Moldova and a slice of northeastern Bulgaria. Around 200,000 to 250,000 were murdered during the Holocaust. Fewer than10,000 Jews live in Romania today; most of them are elderly as more than 340,000 Romanian Jews emigrated to Israel.

Between 2001 and 2007, Centropa employed two teams in Romania, a large country where elderly Jews are scattered in small communities separated by long distances and bad roads. In the northwest part of the country (where most elderly Jews still speak Hungarian) Ildiko Molnar directed our team. Ildiko, a graduate of the Jewish Studies program in Cluj, has worked for Centropa since 2001 and trained more than a dozen interviewers and editors.

In 2006 we began a cooperative partnership with the Goren Goldstein Center for Jewish Studies in Bucharest, and Anca Ciuciu is our education coordinator and Professor Felice Waldman is our historical advisor.

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Centropa in Romania

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Centropa in Greece

We conducted 15 interviews in Greece, all under the stewardship of Dr Rena Molho, one of the leading experts in the history of Salonica's Jews (the name Jews use for Thessaloniki).

More than 90,000 Jews lived in Salonica at the turn of the last century, and Salonica had remained an open port city as part of the Ottoman Empire until 1912. It had never before been a Greek city.

In this fascinating ethnically mixed city, Jews held the majority. Since Jewish porters and merchants dominated the harbor trade, foreigners were often shocked to find the harbor activities closed from Friday evening until Saturday evening.

Almost wholly wiped out during the Holocaust, there are few Jews alive today who recall the time when Ladino, Turkish, Bulgarian and Greek were all spoken on the streets of this bustling port city, and neither the federal government nor the city government recognizes the contributions of Jews in Salonica.

Rena and her team conducted interviews in both Salonica and Athens (where they sought out Jews who had been born in Salonica).

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Centropa in Hungary

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