BUDAPEST, Hungary — Miklos Foldi waited his whole life to embrace his Jewish identity. He got his chance in the most unlikeliest of places: Hungary's Sziget Festival, an annual music and cultural extravaganza that draws an estimated 400,000 people.
Jews From all Walks of Life Come Home in Hungary
BUDAPEST, Hungary — Miklos Foldi waited his whole life to embrace his Jewish identity. He got his chance in the most unlikeliest of places: Hungary’s Sziget Festival, an annual music and cultural extravaganza that draws an estimated 400,000 people.
According to Foldi, whose mother lived through the Holocaust and then Communist domination, it was then that a group of Chabad-Lubavitch rabbis gave him the opportunity to put on tefillin.
“My mother did not want that I should have a Jewish identity,” said Foldi, a 29-year-old psychologist and resident of Budapest. “She told me that it was very dangerous [to be a Jew], that it is better for me to not be Jewish, better to be an atheist.”
But despite Foldi’s parents forbidding him to explore his Jewish roots, an urge to be a part of the Jewish nation never left his mind. At Sziget, his only knowledge of tefillin was that he saw an actor don the prayer-boxes in a movie, but today, he attends classes at the Open University of Judaic Studies in Hungary, a project of Lubavitch of Hungary and directed by Rabbi Shlomo Koves.
