On the occasion of the eighth anniversary of the founding of Czechoslovakia, October 28, 1926, the Neolog Jewish Community of Bratislava (Pozsony, Pressburg) gathered for a commemorative service led by their chief rabbi, Dr. Samuel Funk. They were joined by representatives of the government administration and other religious confessions. Toward the end of his sermon, an increasingly agitated Rabbi Funk turned and pointed with an angry finger at the members of the assimilationist Union of Slovak Jews (Sväz slovenských židov) in attendance from his position behind the podium. He publicly accused them of destroying Jewish unity and making it impossible for the Jewish Party to win a parliamentary mandate.Footnote ¹ He concluded his sermon by recalling a meeting that he had recently enjoyed with the president of Czechoslovakia, Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk. President Masaryk, Funk related, regarded it as very embarrasing that in spite of the 100,000 votes that the Jewish Party had received in 1925,Footnote ² it was not able to obtain even one parliamentary mandate. Funk reported that Masaryk only respected those Jews who declared Jewish as their nationality.Footnote ³

The Union of Slovak Jews recounted this narrative of events in the grievance they lodged against Funk with the Bratislava police on February 17, 1927. Their action marked the opening of a six-year state investigation of the Neolog Jewish Community of Bratislava centered on the personality of Rabbi Funk. The state took a keen interest in the complaint, as the dispute was a window through which it could view the swiftly evolving world of modern Jewish politics, and attempt to understand the implications of the conflict between Jewish nationalist and assimilationist positions within Slovak parameters. The first report of the Bratislava police correspondingly framed the utility of the incident:

This article considers the dimensions of the loyalty issues faced by the Jewish population in Slovakia during the interwar period through an examination of two long-term Czechoslovak state investigations into Jewish personal and communal, national and linguistic behaviors: the “Funk Affair” and the Budapest-based Heroes' Temple memorial project. In the Funk Affair, the state initially focused its examination on Funk's public condemnation of the assimilationist Union of Slovak Jews, considering his attack an expression of less than adequate personal loyalty to Czechoslovakia, rather than of Jewish national conviction. The state later showed greater interest in the dispute between Funk and the leadership of the Neolog Jewish Community of Bratislava, finding the complaints of the community leadership about Funk a result of their own allegedly problematic relationship to Czechoslovakia. The shift in the state's attention from Funk to the Neolog Jewish community matches the growing ascendancy of transnational security issues over domestic socio-cultural affairs.

The Czechoslovak state investigation into the Heroes' Temple memorial in Budapest, a Hungarian Jewish project intended to commemorate all of the Jewish soldiers from the territory of the former Kingdom of Hungary who had fallen during the First World War, is a striking example of how Czechoslovakia understood connections with Hungary and Hungarian Jewry as an indicator of Slovak Jewish citizens' loyalty. The Czechoslovak administration closely followed Slovak Jewish participation in the commemoration project, conflating their potential involvement with the irredentist ambitions of the interwar Hungarian regime.

In this article, I seek to demonstrate the productivity of loyalty as a means of analyzing problems of Jewish relations with the modern state, an essential key for understanding the development of Jewish history.Footnote ⁵ I intend to show how loyalty can be used to locate the active function of nationality and its implications for minority citizenship, especially as it pertains to members of minority religious groups. At the center of my concern is the meaning of “Jewish nationality,” a new category of political nationhood introduced after the First World War, for the state and surrounding Slovak population.

Jewish nationality in Czechoslovakia was directly tied to larger conceptions of nationality in the new state. The most important of these was the new definition of nationality, used for the first time in the 1919 census of the territory of Slovakia, which challenged prewar methods of counting and classifying the population based on language. Czechoslovakia eliminated linguistic criteria (designated as “mother tongue”) as an equivalent indicator of nationality, deciding instead to define nationality as an “internal conviction,” a subjective state known by the individual, similar to religious conviction. This was the basis for the decision that Jews should have the option of declaring their own Jewish nationality, or the nationality of others, without regard for religious affiliation. The specificity of the Jewish case in turn buttressed the general argument for defining nationality as an internal conviction. The state accepted the contention that despite the fact that Jews in Czechoslovakia had “lost Hebrew as their national tongue, and did not even speak Yiddish, [they] had not ceased to live their own peculiar national life.”Footnote ⁶

Czechoslovakia's innovative approach to the question of nationality, not surprisingly, worked to the advantage of the newly dominant “Czechoslovak” nation. When Jews who traditionally had affiliated with German speakers in Bohemia and Moravia, and with Hungarian speakers in Slovakia, now declared Jewish as their nationality, the number of Germans and Hungarians in the state would statistically decrease. Jewish nationality appealed to the state as an authentic expression of Jewish national belonging.

While Czechoslovakia offered the most favorable environment for the Jews of its Eastern and Central European neighbors, renounced antisemitism, and supported Zionism and Jewish national rights, there still remained significant challenges to the Jewish relationship with the state. This was particularly true in Slovakia, where Jews were suspect as potential accomplices to the Hungarian revisionist aims because of their history of alignment with the Hungarian nation, the dominant national group in the former Kingdom of Hungary, of which the territory had been a part.Footnote ⁷ The linguistic and political alignment of the Jews of the former Kingdom of Hungary with the Magyars and Magyar nobility had been essential for the maintenance of a slim Magyar majority over the nationalities of the kingdom, including large minorities of Romanians and Slovaks, and had been rewarded by Hungarian governmental protection from popular anti-Semitism as well as tolerant, liberal policies with regard to the Jewish population. This theme forms the cornerstone of the scholarship on Hungarian Jewish history, most recently by Howard N. Lupovitch and others.Footnote ⁸ In the words of Vavro Šrobár, the Czechoslovak minister for the administration of Slovakia, the Jews in Slovakia had been tools of the Magyar government in carrying out the violent policy of magyarization before the war, had been informants and spies during the war, and had worked as Magyar agitators against the newly formed Czechoslovak Republic after the war.Footnote ⁹

The Magyar/Jewish symbiosis in pre-1918 political and cultural affairs accounts for the primary difference in the post-war relationship of the Jews in Slovakia with the Czechoslovak state when compared with Jews in Bohemia and Moravia. Despite the predilection of many Jews in Bohemia and Moravia for German language, culture, and education,Footnote ¹⁰ Jews had not comprised an essential constituency in the ranks of the German national movement of the late nineteenth century, and found themselves excluded from the movement as it became increasingly radicalized and espoused an evermore anti-Semitic orientation.Footnote ¹¹

In addition, the history of a strong Czech–Jewish movement and census declarations of Czech as their language of daily use by more than 54% of Bohemian and Prague Jews by 1900,Footnote ¹² significantly diluted the question of overwhelming Jewish alliance with a formerly dominant nationality turned interwar irredentist actor. Although 34% of the Jewish population in both Bohemia and Moravia declared German as their nationality on the 1921 state-wide Czechoslovak census,Footnote ¹³ Kateřina Čapková, in her recent study of Jewish national identity in interwar Bohemia, does not indicate that Jews there found their loyalty to Czechoslovakia questioned by the state. Čapková asserts that German Jews, like all Jewish citizens (though here she makes the exception of communists), were fully loyal to the Czechoslovak state and they knew what problems the German minority caused for the Czech government.Footnote ¹⁴

The Jews in the territory of Slovakia were organized into three categories of Jewish religious affiliation: Neolog (or Congress), Orthodox, and Status Quo Ante (neither Neolog nor Orthodox), a legacy of the 1868 Congress of the Jews of the Kingdom of Hungary. Jozséf Eötvös, then the Hungarian minister of education and cults, had organized the congress with the intention of creating a centralized state body to handle Jewish affairs on the model of the French Consistory. Instead, the meeting had resulted in a deep division among the Jews of the Kingdom of Hungary, made official in 1871 with Emperor/King Franz Josef's recognition of Orthodoxy as a separate Jewish religion.Footnote ¹⁵ Hungarian Jewish religious institutional organization carried over to the successor states in all territories that had been part of the Kingdom of Hungary, that is: in Slovakia (Czechoslovakia), Transylvania (Romania), and Vojvodina (Yugoslavia). Jewish communities found it natural to maintain their established religious affiliations. Neolog Judaism is a type of moderate Reform Judaism peculiar to the territories that once comprised the Kingdom of Hungary, which emerged as a means of modernizing Judaism within the Hungarian context, and drawing the Jews closer to the surrounding population. Neolog tendencies began to appear in Hungary in the early nineteenth century, though Neolog Judaism was officially recognized only with the Hungarian Jewish Congress of 1868. It encompassed no radical changes to the traditional liturgy, but allowed for the use of an organ, and moved the bimah from the center to the front of the synagogue, as in reform congregations. Neolog Jews referred to themselves as Hungarians of the Jewish religion, or Hungarians of the Mosaic faith.Footnote ¹⁶

Members of the Neolog branch were considered the most suspect as potential accomplices of the Hungarian revisionist efforts. Neolog Jews tended to have identified themselves more deeply with the Magyar nation and government—that is, to have been “magyarized” in the decades before the war. It is important to distinguish between this form of magyarization and more common patterns of acculturation that were prevalent among the Jews of the Kingdom of Hungary. These included the use of the Magyar language and the declaration of Magyar as one's mother tongue on the census—both expressions of Hungarian Jewish loyalty to, but not necessarily identification with, the Magyar government.

Neolog Jews were more closely watched by the Czechoslovak state than the Orthodox or Status Quo, as well as more strongly courted by Hungary and Hungarian Jewry for the revisionist cause. Unlike the Orthodox majority in the territory of Slovakia, who expressed their acceptance of and loyalty to the new Czechoslovak state by breaking away from the Hungarian statewide Orthodox religious organization in 1920, Neolog communities in Slovakia maintained institutional ties to Budapest until 1926. Only in 1928 did the Neolog and Status Quo communities join to form a separate organization under the name Ješurun.Footnote ¹⁷

Nevertheless, Jews in Slovakia, no matter their religious affiliation, acknowledged that life was better for them in Czechoslovakia than it was for their coreligionists and former compatriots in neighboring Hungary. The collapse of Austria-Hungary and the subsequent peace settlement were devestating for Hungary and Hungarian Jewry. The Treaty of Trianon dissolved the multinational Kingdom of Hungary and left in its place a nationally homogenous, bitter pariah state that was hostile to its Jews. The series of political upheavals that the state experienced immediately following the First World War further damaged the relationship of the Jewish population to the new postwar Hungary.

The most significant upheaval in this respect was the disastrous and short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic of 1919, which counted among its leadership many communists of Jewish origin. The government of Admiral Miklós Horthy came to power riding a crest of legitimacy stemming from its reaction against the 133-day Soviet Republic. The World War One defeat, subsequent collapse of the Monarchy, and reduction of prewar territorial holdings by more than 70%, combined with post-war revolutionary chaos determined the course of interwar Hungarian politics. As many Hungarians held Jewish traitors responsible for the humiliation of the country,Footnote ¹⁸ a popular connection between anti-Semitism and national security developed in the wake of the Bolshevik regime's demise, and with it the belief that “anti-Jewish politics [were] justice for a nation wronged.”Footnote ¹⁹ The Hungarian parliament passed the numerus clausus law in 1920, imposing legislation directed against the Jewish population that limited the number of students of each racial and national group admitted to institutions of higher learning according to their share of the population.Footnote ²⁰ The numerus clausus legislation marked the end of tolerant, liberal pre-war Hungarian government policy toward the Jews and initiated a culture of flourishing anti-Semitism.Footnote ²¹ The memory of the Soviet Republic cast a long shadow of suspicion over the Jewish population of post–World War I Hungary, while the numerus clausus emphasized that they were now regarded as racially distinct from the Magyars.

The great majority of Jews in Slovakia recognized that revising the Treaty of Trianon so as to place the territory of Slovakia under control of the Hungarian government was not in their best interest. They prefered to avail themselves of the possibilities available to them in Czechoslovakia, a parliamentary democracy under the leadership of Masaryk, whom they admired.

The Weiss family of Košice (Kassa, Kaschau), for instance, a city that was both a Hungarian national and Neolog Jewish center in the interwar period, took advantage of the opportunities of their Czechoslovak citizenship to bring relatives up from Sátoraljaújhely, a Hungarian town close to the border with Slovakia. As Erzsébet Weiss recalled, “My father brought [my mother's three younger sisters] to Košice because the standard of living was higher than in Hungary. It was a civic democracy, we lived on an incomparably higher standard than our relatives in Hungary.” Her father arranged for more relatives to come up from Hungary as well.Footnote ²²

To what extent did individual cases such as this soothe the territorial insecurities of interwar Czechoslovakia? The answer is, insignificantly. The Czechoslovak state wanted to see verification of the loyalty of the Jews in Slovkia in very practical terms: by cutting ties with Hungary and Hungarian Jewry. The state wanted to see that Jews in Slovakia did not engage in subversive politics or other activities detrimental to state security.

The Funk Affair

For this purpose, Rabbi Dr. Samuel Funk was a useful person for the state to follow. He was a well-known eccentric and choleric character whose outspoken opinions often exposed the fault lines in Jewish community politics. By all accounts, Funk used his position as chief Neolog rabbi to proclaim his political judgments and hurl insults from behind the podium. He was a great admirer of Masaryk, whom he habitually quoted and referred to as the “Benefactor of the Jews” (dobrodinca židov). Funk included passages from well-known Czech authors in his sermons, which was said to make members of the congregation who had been raised as Hungarians uncomfortable. In general, Funk's unpleasant temperament earned him a remarkably small following. Many members of the Neolog community allegedly avoided him at all costs.Footnote ²³ The Bratislava police investigating the case of the grievance of the Union of Slovak Jews against Funk viewed it as characteristic of the local Zionists to allow an irresponsible person like Funk to act as the mouthpiece in their struggle against the Union of Slovak Jews.Footnote ²⁴ This observation was typical of the investigation's generally unflattering evaluation of Funk's personality and behavior.

Funk's attack on the Union of Slovak Jews put him in an awkward position. Now he had to prove that he was a loyal citizen who did not harbor anti-Slovak feelings. The situation was made more disagreeable by the fact that since his meeting with Masaryk, Funk had trumpeted himself as a confidant whom the president consulted in serious political and cultural matters.Footnote ²⁵ Things did not look good for Funk. He attempted to clear his name by airing his side of the story in a leading Slovak daily (Slovenský denník), but the editorial board refused his request. He tried to become a member of the Slovak League (Slovenský líga), a prominent Slovak national organization, but found no success. At the consecration ceremony of the new synagogue in Parkaň (Hungarian, Parkány; later renamed Šturovo) close to the border with Hungary, Funk gave his address in the state language, Slovak, instead of his usual German.Footnote ²⁶

Leo Sipos, a Bratislava lawyer and a leading figure in the Zionist movement in Slovakia, was the only source interviewed in the early phase of the investigation who spoke in support of Funk. Sipos confidentially testified in 1927 that Funk's attack on the Union of Slovak Jews derived from the rabbi's belief that the founding of a Slovak Jewish political party would harm Jewish interests and undermine the wishes of Masaryk, who admonished the Jews in Slovakia to “return to the worldview of [their] forefathers, be Jews, and abandon [their] role as exponents of the Magyars.”Footnote ²⁷ Sipos stressed that Funk condemned Jewish assimilation, and believed it essential for Jews to achieve national independence.Footnote ²⁸

Sipos's argument articulated the perceptions of Jewish nationality held by the Jewish national movement. The Jewish national leadership advanced Jewish nationality and Jewish national politics as an inherently anti-assimilationist position, considering it an honest way of remaining “true to ourselves” and expressing the conviction of belonging to “no other people than the Jewish people.”Footnote ²⁹ By declaring Jewish nationality and pursuing Jewish national politics, they argued, Jews could simply be Jews and avoid the dangers and misunderstandings of national affiliations in the multinational state. As such, it also seemed to be a good means of demonstrating separation from the prewar practice of affiliating with the dominant Magyar nation. Understood in this way, Jewish nationality was an elegant fulfillment of Masayk's appeal.

In the eyes of the state, however, the embrace of Jewish national politics was not compelling evidence of abandoning the role of “exponents of the Magyars.” The state suspected a Magyar subtext to Jewish national politics in Slovakia, revealed in the same anti-assimilationist stance of the Jewish national program that Jews thought cleared them of that suspicion. “Zionism here in the republic has a political background,” concluded the 1927 report, “which means that Jews who were brought up in the German or Magyar spirit and who still sympathize with Magyar thinking—they are against any kind of assimilation.” The state believed that Jews in Slovakia who maintained a Magyar orientation found defense against pressures to assimilate into the new Slovak environment under the banner of Jewish politics.Footnote ³⁰

The Czechoslovak administration concluded its first report on the Funk affair in the year 1927, a year which, not uncoincidently, marked a turning point in the history of the Hungarian movement to revise the borders established by the Treaty of Trianon. In that year, the English Lord Rothmere began his “Justice for Hungary” campaign in his newspaper the Daily Mail, the Hungarian Revisionist League was founded, international financial and military monitors left Hungary, and the Horthy government signed a treaty of friendship and cooperation with Mussolini's Italy. In addition, the intensification of the Hungarian revisionist campaign coincided with the beginning of the Tuka Affair in Czechoslovakia, in which Vojtěch Tuka was found guilty in 1929 of working for the restoration of the pre-war Kingdom of Hungary as an agent of the Interwar Hungarian government under the guise of struggling for the creation of an independent Slovakia. Together, these events generally heightened Czechoslovak state suspicion of Jews in Slovakia as potential accomplices to Hungarian ambitions, as well as colored its interpretations of Jewish politics.

In the case of Bohemia, the greatest analogous suspicion seems to have stemmed not from the side of the state, but from the Czech Jews (Čechožidé). Before the 1920 parliamentary elections, for instance, the Czech Jewish leadership suggested to the Czech National Council that the Jewish National candidate from the Associated Jewish Parties may not be loyal to the Czech nation if elected to parliament. They argued that Zionists with a German or Hungarian past and upbringing may be beholden to the interests of another party than would be representatives of the Czech nation, which could work against Czech interests. Masaryk, Beneš, and other leading governmental figures did not take the advice of the Czech Jews to reject the candidate from the Associated Jewish Parties, but instead supported the Jewish national movement, its leadership and candidates. The Jewish national movement in Bohemia and Moravia reciprocated the continuing support of the government with efforts to make Czech the language of the movement, especially in Moravia, and promoting the use of Czech in Zionist meetings and periodicals. The German language was not used at all at the Zionist Congress in Prague in 1933 as a protest against Nazism. It is worth noting that across Czechoslovakia, it was the Jewish assimilationist movements that stressed the potential disloyalty of the Jewish Nationalists to state.

The Funk Affair raised awareness of the variety of Jewish opinion on the question of national affiliation within the Jewish community and within the population at large. Until then, noted the prominent Slovak daily Národný denník, little was generally known about the activities of the Union of Slovak Jews. Jews were Jews, and that was that. Now, the paper continued, the differences between the Jewish nationalist and Slovak assimilationist camps were becoming visible.

The conflict between Funk and the Union of Slovak Jews fueled local Slovak and Czechoslovak state suspicions that the Jewish national movement was in fact a cover for Magyar national activity. Slovak public opinion, not surprisingly, quickly lined up behind the Union of Slovak Jews. Národný denník congratulated itself ten days after Funk's outburst for having pointed to the Zionists as promoters of magyarization in Slovakia even earlier: it was evident that Jews who opposed the Union of Slovak Jews were Magyar national elements.Footnote ³¹Slovenský denník later called Funk the “Jewish Tuka,”Footnote ³² a reference to Vojtěch Tuka, who had been found guilty in 1929 of working for the restoration of the prewar Kingdom of Hungary as an agent of the interwar Hungarian government under the guise of struggling for the creation of an independent Slovakia.

Slovak authorities, even earlier, tended to view Zionism as a branch of Hungarian revisionist activity in Slovakia. A 1925 preelection report discussing the Zionist candidate from the district chief of Hlohovec in western Slovakia bears out this point:

Slovak authorities also carried out a series of investigations of possible Hungarian irredentist activity within Jewish national sport, cultural, and educational associations in Slovakia in 1926, employing language as a basis of inquiry. The police reports expressed offense that these associations carried out their activities in Magyar and German, and offered foreign-language instruction in English, French, and Hebrew, but did not use Slovak, the state language. The investigations, however, did not turn up any concrete evidence of antistate propaganda.Footnote ³⁴ The police official investigating the branch of the Jewish scout association Ha-Shomer ha-Tsair in Komárno noted that he heard only one word in Slovak: “Pozor!” (attention!).Footnote ³⁵

On the state level as well as in public opinion, the expression of Slovak suspicions and grievances against Jews converged on the issue of Magyar language use. “There are no Jews in the world like the ones in Slovakia,” acidly remarked the author of a 1929 article in Nitrianské noviny:

Using the Slovak language was also regarded as the fulfillment of an obligation both to the Slovak nation and to Czechoslovakia, as seen in the following evaluation of Jewish community education from the Košice-based daily Slovenský východ:

From this perspective, there could be no neutral maintenance of the Magyar language among the Jewish population, at the very least for official purposes. The Slovak press sharply criticized Jews who wished to preserve the Magyar language and culture in Slovakia while at the same time putting themselves forth as loyal citizens of the state and declaring their own separate Jewish nationality:

The seeming inconsistency of the national orientation of Jews who declared Jewish nationality but continued to speak Magyar corroborated the distrust that Slovak state authorities as well as the local Slovak population felt for Jews. They interpreted claims of Jewish nationality accompanied by the continued use of the Hungarian langugage as disingenuous. The Jewish loyalty question was framed in linguistic terms.

When the Union of Slovak Jews brought their grievance to the Bratislava police, they struck back at Funk as well as exposed the weaknesses of the Jewish national movement in Slovakia. They also demonstrated their confidence in the validity of their complaint and the correctness of their position regarding the state and the local Slovak population.

The 1927 police report shrewdly observed that the real motivation of the Union of Slovak Jews in lodging their grievance against Funk was to pressure the leadership of the Neolog Jewish Community to grant their request to hold Slovak-language services in the Neolog synagogue. “It is an open secret,” the report remarked, “that this request has found no echo with the community board, whose members are primarily Germans and Magyars.”Footnote ³⁹

The subsequent shift in attention to the leadership of the Neolog Jewish Community of Bratislava from the Union of Slovak Jews led to a dramatic turnaround in the state's view of the much-maligned Rabbi Funk. By 1932, the state had reversed its perception of Funk from magyarophile element working under the cover of Zionism, to loyal Czechoslovak citizen and advocate of the lower classes. The state instead condemned the community leadership as a disloyal element that behaved in the political interests of Hungary rather than of Czechoslovakia.Footnote ⁴⁰ A spate of articles appeared in the statewide press in 1932 (notably in the papers České slovo, A Zet, and Slovenský večerník), drumming up the public's interest in the question of the national orientation of Slovak Jews.Footnote ⁴¹

The ongoing conflict between Funk and the leadership of the Neolog Jewish community erupted into open antagonism after Masaryk's visit to Bratislava in mid-October 1930. On that occasion, Viktor Stein, the president of the community, arranged Neolog Jewish participation in the program in such way that Funk was unable to officially greet Masaryk on behalf of the Neologs, as his Orthodox counterpart was able to do. Stein also made it impossible for Funk to bless Masaryk, an honor enjoyed by the Orthodox rabbi Akiba Schreiber.Footnote ⁴²

Stein himself gave the official speech, in which he remarked that it was the fate of the Jews to “suffer in silence.”Footnote ⁴³ Masaryk responded to Stein's comment with indignation, declaring, “In our republic you have nothing to suffer from, here all can live in freedom as decent men.”Footnote ⁴⁴ Funk rebuked Stein's speech on the following day, detailing a long list of the rights and privileges the Jews in Czechoslovakia enjoyed. Funk testified that his exclusion from Masaryk's visit not only had been unjust and contrary to the obligations of his office, but also constituted an anti-Czechoslovak stand. Funk demanded that the state examine the motivations behind Stein's actions.

The state did so, and concluded that Stein's “nonsensical” complaints stemmed from his “well-known Magyar chauvanistic conviction.”Footnote ⁴⁵ By this reasoning, Stein had barred Funk from Masaryk's visit out of fear that Funk would offend Stein's connections in Hungary with a very loyal address to Czechoslovakia. In Funk's place, Stein delivered a speech that the state considered grist for the mill of Hungarian interests.Footnote ⁴⁶ According to the conclusions of the state investigation, Stein's meaning was quite clear when considered alongside his other dubious activites, especially the appointment of three rabbis trained at the allegedly irredentist Budapest Rabbinical Seminary to positions with Neolog Jewish communities in Slovakia.Footnote ⁴⁷ The state held Stein responsible for bringing these “very chauvanistic Magyars” from Hungary to serve in Slovakia.Footnote ⁴⁸

In comparison with Stein, rather than with the Union of Slovak Jews, the state found Funk's behavior correct, if eccentric. The 1932 report went so far as to paint Funk as a beacon of democracy, a hero of the lower classes in the Neolog Jewish community, struggling for their just representation within the rich community leadership. The report enthusiastically noted that Funk called for the overthrow of the current leadership—whom Funk regarded as lukewarm to Czechoslovakia because of their property holdings in HungaryFootnote ⁴⁹—and for rewriting the community statutes, which he argued had been designed under the former regime to favor the rich.Footnote ⁵⁰

Other points in Funk's favor included his use of the Slovak language for official events and his condemnation of actions that could potentially harm the Czechoslovak state. The report emphasized that Funk had delivered part of his address in Slovak on the occasions of Masaryk's birthday and the anniversary of the founding of Czechoslovakia in 1932, demonstrating his efforts to become proficient in the state language even at his advanced age. Funk vigorously protested against Stein's filling rabbinical positions in Slovakia with graduates of the seminary in Budapest, against the English Lord Rothmere's international campaign for the revision of Hungary's borders, and against the declaration made by the Hungarian minister of defense, Gyula Gömbös, in 1930 that he regarded the Jews in Slovakia to be supporters of Hungary. In addition, Funk called on the members of the Neolog Jewish Community in Bratislava to condemn Gömbös's statement and thereby show their loyalty to Czechoslovakia.Footnote ⁵¹

The reversal of the state's view of Funk over the course of its six-year investigation corresponded with a shift in the markers that the state defined as indicators of citizen loyalty, as well as its techniques of observation. At first, the investigation was based on internal strife within the Neolog Jewish community connected to issues of relations with the surrounding Slovak population. Later, the investigation centered on problems with a more immediate bearing on external relations with Hungary: the connections of the leadership of the Neolog Jewish community with Hungary, their property holdings in Hungary, the appointment of rabbis who were Hungarian citizens trained at the rabbinical seminary in Budapest, and responses to the international Justice for Hungary campaign of Lord Rothmere and to the contentious statements of Hungarian minister of defense Gömbös in the Hungarian parliament.

A host of linguistic, social, cultural, and religious issues burdened Jewish–Slovak relations: interpreting these was an ineffective way of determining overall allegience to the Czechoslovak state. The state could better determine the political loyalties of its Slovak Jewish citizens by considering their connections to Hungary or Hungarian Jewry, and to activity that ran counter to Czechoslovak interests. Matters of citizen loyalty gained meaning in the transnational context.

The Heroes' Temple commemoration project

The Heroes' Temple (Hősök Temploma) lies on the corner plot of Wesselényi and Dohány streets in central Budapest. It is a modest building: its minimalist lines contrast with the Moorish grandeur of its neighbor, the monumental Dohány Street Synagogue, which was consecrated with much pomp and circumstance in September 1859. Conceived in 1927 and completed in time for Rosh Hashanah services in September 1931, the Heroes' Temple serves as both a Neolog prayer hall and a site of commemoration for the 10,000 Jewish soldiers from the prewar territory of the Kingdom of Hungary who fought and died for the monarchy during World War I.

The case of the Heroes' Temple memorial project was one of the most intriguing used by the Czechoslovak state to investigate the political loyalties of Jews in Slovakia. Perceiving the project as a potential branch of the larger Hungarian irredentist enterprise, the administration filed the documents relating to the Heroes' Temple under the heading “Hungarian Jews and the Revision of Trianon,” and stamped them “classified” and “urgent.” It was clear that the Czechoslovak government was deeply suspicious of a war commemoration project that extended beyond the Trianon borders of Hungary in its scope. By remembering the Jews of Slovakia and Subcarpathian Ruthenia as Hungarians, the project appeared to go hand in hand with the revisionist ambitions of the Horthy government.

The Budapest Jewish community intended to engrave the names of the 10,000 fallen Hungarian Jewish soldiers in marble on the walls of the memorial, a fact that the Czechoslovak state administration noted with exclamation marks in its reports on the project. Physical representation of numbers and names was important to the Budapest Jewish community for proving the extent of the Hungarian Jewish wartime sacrifice. The Hungarian Jewish newspaper Egyenlőség had kept a running list of fallen Jewish soldiers throughout the course of the war. In 1922, the Hungarian National Statistical Bureau had calculated the figure at 10,000, based on the prewar territory of Hungary, as the official number of fallen Hungarian Jewish soldiers. That number was recalculated in 1927 to 5,116 based on the bounds of the postwar territory. The recalculation was taken as offensive and inaccurate by Hungarian Jews.Footnote ⁵² Because they regarded 10,000 as the accurate number, it was important to back it up with the personal data of soldiers from the successor states.

The Czechoslovak investigation of Slovak Jewish participation in the Heroes' Temple commemoration project began in September 1929, shortly after the chief Orthodox rabbi of Slovakia, Koloman Wéber, advised the government to be on the lookout for revisionist activity on the part of Hungarian Jewry.Footnote ⁵³ The state proceeded to follow the activities of several rabbis and Neolog Jewish communities in Slovakia to see whether they were involved in any way with the building of the Heroes' Temple.Footnote ⁵⁴

The Budapest Jewish community was inspired to create the Heroes' Temple memorial by a call from the Hungarian government for each religious community in the country to commemorate its own war martyrs. Within this context, the building of the Heroes' Temple seemed like a perfect opportunity to simultaneously accomplish three objectives: to mourn the dead, to support the official declaration that “[Hungary] is bleeding from a thousand wounds,”Footnote ⁵⁵ and to remind postwar Hungary of the loyalty and patriotism of its Jewish citizens. The latter was of particular importance after the disastrous and short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic of 1919, which had counted among its leadership many communists of Jewish origin. The Budapest Jewish community set up a commission right away to meet with the rabbis in the successor states in order to gather financial and other support for the Heroes' Temple project, as well as to enter the personal data of the fallen soldiers.Footnote ⁵⁶

In their quest to reaffirm the loyalty and patriotism of Hungarian Jewry during the war, as well as to testify to their continued devotion to and identification with postwar Hungary, however, the Budapest Jewish community set its needs on a collision course with those of the Jews in Slovakia. Any involvement of Jews in Slovakia in the Heroes' Temple project would only serve to make them more suspicious as pro-Hungarian elements in the eyes of the Czechoslovak state. The situation represented an inevitable and irreconcilable conflict of interests. Demonstrating the loyalty of the Jews in Slovakia to Czechoslovakia depended on their breaking ties with Hungary and Hungarian Jewry. In November 1929, the Czechoslovak administration advised the Jews in Slovakia to “reject the courting of their coreligionists from Hungary in so far as it concerns obvious, but unacknowledged irredentist activity,” and recommended that Czechoslovak officials carefully follow Jews with Hungarian connections.Footnote ⁵⁷

An understanding of distance from Budapest is required to comprehend the impact and fallout of the Heroes' Temple memorial project. Viewing it from a territory that had been part of the prewar Hungarian state allows for the charting of issues emphasized by the project, especially as they facilitated a more concrete expression of altered postwar group belongings. For Neolog Jews in Slovakia, the project facilitated their reorientation as Slovak Jews, an identity characterized by fluidity of movement among the aspects of their group belongings, especially with regard to the separation of language use from national conviction.

Recent literature on the process of commemoration asks us to consider whom or what war memorials are asking us to remember. In what ways do these memorials reflect the search for meaning in war? As sites of rituals, rhetoric, and ceremonies of mourning, they speak of the connection of the past to the present, the living to the dead, and to the location of the trauma of war in contemporary memory.Footnote ⁵⁸ This connection is especially poignant in cases of geopolitical discontinuity. If Slovak Jews were to participate in the Heroes' Temple project with their coreligionists and former compatriots, they, too, would be mourning the collapse of the Kingdom of Hungary. Their sons had fought and died for Hungary as Hungarians on the battlefield, but it was no longer possible to mourn them as such. The creation of the Czechoslovak state in which they now lived depended on the collapse of the monarchy, and its continued existence rested on keeping the revisionist ambitions of postwar Hungary at bay.

The Czechoslovak state hoped that the following of developments related to the Heroes' Temple memorial project would provide it with a barometer of Jewish connections to Hungary. The bulk of the investigations took place in early fall 1929, and were carried out by local authorities. In most cases, this meant the local police.

The most detailed reports came in to Bratislava and Prague from Nitra in western Slovakia and from Prešov in eastern Slovakia in the first half of November 1929. In the police report from Nitra, the head rabbi confirmed that he had received a letter with the stamp of the Heroes' Temple on it in February from Péter Ujváry, who, along with Samuel Glückstahl, a member of the Upper House in Hungary, was gathering the personal data of fallen soldiers in Slovakia. Ujváry was seeking the names of fallen soldiers as well as subscribers to the memorial. The police investigator stated that as far as it was possible for him to ascertain, none of the rabbis in the area of Nitra had joined the commission to help gather names, but some may have given names to Ujváry because doing so represented a good opportunity to show pride in those Jewish soldiers of the former Hungary. Significantly, he noted in his report that it would be mistaken to assume that the Jews in Nitra were under the influence of Hungarian Jewry, because they felt at home and were convinced that life is better in the Czechoslovak Republic than in neighboring Hungary. Jews in Nitra had told him that they knew their coreligionists in Hungary were “politically persecuted.” As a final note, the police investigator added that Ujváry was in the southern Slovak town of Nové Zamky and had been in Bratislava four years earlier (1925), trying to raise money for an “Album of Heroes” among the Jews in Neolog communities, but had not been able to collect the necessary amount.Footnote ⁵⁹

The police report from Prešov, a Neolog Jewish stronghold in eastern Slovakia, makes for convincing proof that the Jews there were not involved in the Heroes' Temple project or other suspected irredentist activity. The report exhibits a bluntly hostile position toward the local Jewish population. Sure, the report states,

Notwithstanding his own unfriendly attitude, the author of the report recognized that the Hungarian irredentist movement, and especially the antisemitic Revisionist League, would hardly be an attractive forum for anti-Czechoslovak activity among Jews in Slovakia. All of the Jews of Prešov were “100 percent magyarized,” he stressed, but Hungarian assimilation ended after the changes. In its place came Zionism, which propagated Jewish nationality and asserted that the Jews should have their own sovereign state in Palestine. In Prešov, a Dr. Karol Ferbstein spread Zionism, recruiting mainly from magyarized Jews, who “vote for a separate Jewish nation, but are not able to rid themselves of the Hungarian mentality.” The report concluded that it was better for the Jews in Czechoslovakia than it was in Hungary, even before the war, which is the primary reason they were not interested in the success of any plans for revising the Trianon borders—not because of any special love for or loyalty to the state.Footnote ⁶¹

Briefer reports arrived throughout 1930 and 1931, many repeating information that was known. Several concerned specific instances of Jewish interaction with Ujváry, Glückstahl, or the local authorities. For example, the Jewish community in Snina, in northeastern Slovakia, did gather names of fallen Jewish soldiers from their community as Ujváry had requested, but the president of the Jewish community had refused to send the data to Budapest despite repeated reminders. He later received a questionnaire from Ujváry, which he handed over to local officials.Footnote ⁶²

A report from the spring of 1930 stated that Ujváry and Glückstahl had visited the Neolog Jewish community in Šahy, southwestern Slovakia, in February 1929 to request the names of fallen soldiers. At that time, the head of the Jewish religious community there, Dr. Jakub Váradi, had the requested information be drawn up and sent to Budapest. However, he wanted the record to state clearly that he had intended the document only to serve the purpose of piety and reverence for the dead, and to prove the falsity of accusations from antisemitic circles that the Jewish population had not sacrificed their blood on the battlefields. He did not wish to have anything to do with further Hungarian actions. The report concluded with a list of Slovak national organizations to which Váradi belonged, noting his membership on the board of the Matica Slovenska and his active role in the Agrarian Party, and stating that he had come forward against the Justice for Hungary action of Lord Rothmere.Footnote ⁶³

To what extent was the investigation of Neolog Jews in Slovakia successful in determining levels of continuing political loyalty to Hungary? The Heroes' Temple memorial project was important in the eyes of the Czechoslovak government only for this purpose. The method, while ingenious, was far from foolproof. The Heroes' Temple was, after all, a memorial for fallen Hungarian Jewish soldiers, and the sons of the Jews in Slovakia had died as Hungarian Jews. How else were they to be mourned?

As the reports show, Jews in Slovakia were not willing to be viewed as Trianon revisionists for the sake of participating in the Heroes' Temple memorial. Nevertheless, the commemoration project of the Budapest Jewish community proved attractive. The Czechoslovak government would have been wrong to assume that two of the motivations that drove the Budapest community to undertake the project—mourning the dead and fighting antisemitic accusations—would not appeal to Jews in Slovakia.

However, the accusations of involvement with Hungarian revisionism aimed at the Jews in Slovakia, focusing on Neolog Jewry, took precedence. Jews in Slovakia chose to commemorate their war dead locally and modestly. Examples of their memorials include a plaque at the entrance to the Neolog cemetery in Bratislava, a pillar and rectangular concrete slab in the Neolog cemetery in Prešov, and a plaque on the wall of the Neolog synagogue in Bytča.Footnote ⁶⁴ In this way, those who chose to do so could publicly pay tribute to their war dead without being connected to a project initiated by Budapest that raised the suspicion of the Czechoslovak state.

The Heroes' Temple memorial project illustrates a turning point in the history of Slovak Jewry. It marked the conclusion of a formative period in which their linguistic and cultural ties to Hungary were unbound from political ones. Their peculiar position as a group had become more clearly defined in relation to Hungary, Hungarian Jewry, and the Hungarian minority in Slovakia. As the police report from Prešov noted, Hungarian assimilation had ended after the changes, and in its place had come Zionism, which propagated Jewish nationality. Jewish nationality was the primary means by which the majority of Slovak Jews expressed their internal convictions.