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Grandfather came from a very poor family. His family was too poor to pay for his studies and he received a scholarship form a Catholic organization in Szeged [Hungary]. They financed both his bachelor’s degree and his doctorate in Berlin but did not make any religious pressure on him. After finishing his doctorate he returned to Senta where he taught Greek and Latin in a local gymnasium. He spent his life close to his books and was not interested in traveling. Grandmother took after her father, Moric, who was not religious whereas grandfather was traditional in his religious practices. He went to synagogue and observed some of the traditional practices and was an active member of the Neolog community. [Following a Congress in 1868/69 in Budapest, where the Jewish community was supposed to discuss several issues on which the opinion of the traditionalists and the modernizers differed and which aimed at uniting Hungarian Jews, Hungarian Jewry was officially split into to (later three) communities, which all built up their own national community network. The Neologs were the modernizers, who opposed the Orthodox on various questions.] Grandmother accepted these practices as the status quo at home but when she was on her travels she would not adhere to them. Grandfather died young, at the age of 51, on December 2, 1929 and is buried in the Jewish cemetery in Senta. He had one sister, Berta, who lived in Novi Sad. Berta, her daughter Kati and the rest of her family were killed in the raid of Novi Sad in January 1943.
Location
Serbia
Interview
Aleksandar Necak