The Jewish Heritage of Szeged, a travelogue lecture by Tatjana Bogdan Sečnik

The first Jewish families immigrated to Szeged at the end of the 18th century, and soon after settling, the Jews built their first synagogue in the city. Despite occasional difficulties, the Jewish community in Szeged flourished in the following century and by the beginning of the 20th century had more than 6,000 members. In 1903, a new synagogue was built, designed by the famous Lipot Baumhorn, and is said to be the second largest synagogue in Hungary to this day. In the period between the two world wars, many Jews became enthusiastic about the Zionist idea and emigrated to Palestine during the British Mandate, but the community in Szeged was still quite large at the beginning of the Second World War. After mass arrests in 1944, the Jews of Szeged were sent to Auschwitz, from where a few hundred returned. The community continued to decline after the war, but they managed to restore and rededicate the synagogue in 1989. Tatjana Bogdan Sečnik will lecture on the Jewish heritage of Szeged.