It’s a pleasure to re-visit Jewish heritage sites and see the progress on (or completion of) projects we’ve posted about before (or when) they got under way.
Just four years ago, in September 2018, we visited the Jewish cemetery in the Lake Balaton resort town of Balatonfüred, Hungary, where restoration work was about to begin.
The cemetery was partially overgrown with trees and shrubs, the wall was partially collapsed, some headstones lay toppled and broken.
When we visited again this week, we found that the planned work had been completed some time ago.
And plans are still moving forward for the memorial park area that encompasses the old cemeteries of three local religious groups — Jewish, Protestant, and Roman Catholic — which lie next to each other on a wooded hill overlooking the town and Lake Balaton.
As in 2018, our guide was Ferenc Olti, a native of Balatonfüred and long-time Jewish activist, who lives in the town and has spearheaded the project.
In the cemetery are the graves of some of Olti’s ancestors and family members; other family members are commemorated on a Holocaust memorial there that lists the names of local victims.
Olti had told us in 2018 that the initial work on the cemetery would include repairing the broken stone wall and creating a new entryway, clearing vegetation, and re-erecting toppled stones, and putting back together headstones that were broken.
All this has been accomplished, and the Holocaust memorial has also been cleaned and refurbished.
The restoration was carried out with funding from the government granted through the Hungarian Jewish Heritage Public Foundation (MAZSÖK), as part of a state-funded program to maintain and restore abandoned or neglected Jewish cemeteries. Via this program, MAZSÖK launched public calls starting in 2018, in which municipalities could present project proposals to restore their local Jewish cemeteries.
Private donors also contributed to the project — the donors are listed on a plaque.
In a separate, privately funded initiative, one new memorial has been added — a large stone, dedicated to the memory of the philosopher Agnes Heller, a frequent visitor to Balatonfüred since childhood, who died in 2019, aged 90, while swimming in the lake.
The memorial stone, bearing the inscription “She loved freedom and the Balaton,” was dedicated on the first anniversary of her death, and signage designates the part of the cemetery around the memorial stone as the Agnes Heller Memorial Park.
Jews settled in Balatonfüred in the 18th century and became active in wine production.
Around 150 Jews lived there on the eve of World War II; they were deported to Auschwitz, and only 15 survived. These included Olti’s parents, whose pre-WW2 families were murdered and whose names are included in the list on the cemetery’s Holocaust memorial.
The cemetery includes around 120 graves, with the oldest legible headstone from 1812. The inscriptions evoke the evolution of the community — the earliest are in Hebrew, with later inscriptions in German and Hungarian.
The new entryway at the rear of the cemetery opens onto a path that leads through the park-like Catholic and Protestant cemeteries, both of which are long out of use and include only a few scattered headstones.
Olti told us that there are plans for the path to continue into the Jewish cemetery, through the new entryway, to complete the integration into the multi-faith memorial setting.
This gate is locked (as is the main gate, on the main road) but there is a number to call to get a code for the lock.
Keys to the cemetery can also be obtained at the town’s former synagogue, which anchors a hi-tech interactive education centre honouring Jewish achievement in science and culture, which Olti founded in 2018.
Read our 2018 post previewing the cemetery restoration