We were delighted to see the baroque synagogue Mád, Hungary — one of our favorites — make the pages of the New York Times in, of all places, the weddings section.
The reason? What was described as the first Jewish wedding ceremony to take place there since the Holocaust was celebrated in August (followed by a registry office ceremony in New York on October 18).
The couple, Viktoria Bedö of Budapest and Jonah Chaim Fisher of New York, met in July 2016 at the JDC/Lauder Foundation International Jewish Youth Camp at Szarvas, in southern Hungary, which since 1990 has brought Jewish young people from around the world together to learn about Jewish life and strengthen their Jewish identity.
They had both been hired to work there by Rabbi Seth Braunstein, who performed the August 30 ceremony in Mád, a picturesque wine-making village in the Tokaj wine region of northeastern Hungary.
The New York Times writes, in an article titled “A Celebration Uniting Past, Present and Future (Mom Predicted It)”:
Ms. Bedö grew up in Budapest in an assimilated Roman Catholic household; Mr. Fisher grew up on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in a Jewish community. “His grandfather was a Holocaust survivor from Munkacs,” she said. “My family is not Jewish and I converted when I was 17,” said Ms. Bedö, who was hired to explore Jewish identity and Jewish experience with the North American group [at Szarvas].
Their overlapping interest in Hungarian Jewish past drew them to each other. Ms. Bedö told him when she was 20, she took a mother-daughter trip to the Tokaj wine region where they visited Mad Synagogue on a hilltop. Her mother then predicted she would get married there one day. ”
Pictures show that the wedding took place outdoors, under a chuppah erected in front of the synagogue, which was built in 1795 and is one of the oldest in Hungary.
The building stood abandoned for decades before it was fully restored in 2004. The restoration received the Europa Nostra Prize, presented in 2005. Here is a gallery of photos showing the interior of the synagogue.
The Tokaj region is known — besides wine — for the tombs of several Hasidic “wonder rabbis” whose burial places have long been sites of pilgrimage for their religious followers, and there are a number of significant places of Jewish built heritage dating back to the 18th century.
We posted in October 2017 about a new initiative in Mád has created a tourism hub that now caters to religious pilgrims, wine-lovers, and mainstream tourists alike.
Called “Footsteps of the Wonder Rabbis,” the center is housed in the renovated former rabbi’s house and yeshiva in Mád that had long stood derelict next to the synagogue.
Click to see a gallery of photos of the wedding by Sara Petrak
Click to read the New York Times article about the wedding
Click to read our October 2017 article about the Mád synagogue and tourism hub