#mukachevo

MUNKACS - now MUKACZEVO / UKRAINE (see the old city names below).

"This project started somewhat by chance, like almost everything else in life," Éva Horvát, who came into contact with the community through Miklós Rékai, an ethnographer of the Jews of Mukachevo, says. Rékai had been researching the lives of the remaining Hungarian-identity Jews in Mukachevo for a year when Éva Horvát was offered the opportunity to join the project.

"It was a really big opportunity. I was very interested in this community, whose identity was defined by their origins and traditions, while they were living in socially different living conditions. Their system of traditions was rooted in an identity from a very long time ago, while on the other hand, their lives were defined by the pre-war period, the Holocaust, communism, and the regime change as well," the photographer explains.

She spent three years documenting the life of the Jewish community in Mukachevo, including visiting their religious festivals. "We would spend three or four days with them each time, staying in their homes, living with them," she says.

Horvát regularly visited the last Jewish diaspora in Mukachevo between 1992 and 1995, and the Hungarian Museum of Ethnography held an exhibition of her pictures in 1995. Later, the pictures appeared in various collections in several countries, although not in Mukachevo: the people of Mukachevo came to Hungary to see them.

The photos are now being published as a book for the first time under the title "Fallen Oaks, Scattered Seeds" – we chose a selection of the text and pictures from the publication and spoke with Horvát about how she and Rékai experienced the three-year project. Éva Horvát's photographic material is a memorial to the last Hasidic community in Mukachevo, and provides us with a glimpse into the poverty of socialism and the collapse of Transcarpathia after the fall of communism. At the same time, the photos also give insight into the life of a community traumatized by war, whose members, in their own way, are holding on to what keeps them together – their traditions and their religion.

For a long time, Mukachevo was one of the centers of Hungarian-speaking Jewry, the bastion of Hasidism in Hungary, as the book describes it. It was in the 17th century that some Jews from Galicia and Ukraine came to the area of Mukachevo and founded a new community. They were trying to escape the rule of the Zaporizhzhya Cossack Bohdan Khmelnitsky and the ethnic cleansing that took place under him. The Jewish congregation was officially established in 1741, and the town was given a synagogue.

The community soon began to flourish: as the book describes, the number of Jews in Transcarpathia almost doubled between 1869 and 1910, from 64 903 to 128 791. "In 1778 there were already Jewish craftsmen in the area of Mukachevo. [...] The Jews are taking an interest in the public affairs of the city, and they also take a keen interest in the election of judges. In 1792, the Jews consumed wine at the rate of 9 pints", Imre Csetényi wrote in his 1928 text on the Jews of Mukachevo, in his work describing the presence of Jews in the area in the 18th century.

In 1941, the Hungarian army marched into Mukachevo, and the persecution and harassment of Jews began. As Horvát says, before the war, at least 50 percent of Mukachevo's population was Jewish, and the Holocaust became a huge watershed.