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Message: <br /><br /> If you are having trouble reading this email, you may view this article online at: http://www.jweekly.com/6658/full/6658/potlucks-surrogate-kin-mark-expatriates-high-holy-days/ <br /><br /> <b>Potlucks, surrogate kin mark expatriates’ High Holy Days</b> <br /> Friday, September 26, 1997 | by <p>MICHAEL J. JORDAN </p> <br /><br /><p>BUDAPEST—American Jews in Budapest are preparing for holidays spent away from home.<br /><br /> But Hungarian Jews today are largely assimilated. If they celebrate Jewish holidays at all, they do so with their own families.<br /><br /> So American Jews—a significant portion of the estimated 16,000 Americans now living in Hungary—tend to gravitate toward their own during the holidays, celebrating with friends who have become surrogate families.<br /><br /> A network mentality kicks in.<br /><br /> "I knew three Jews here and those people knew some" more people, said Anita Altman, a three-year resident of Budapest and the lifestyle editor of the English-language weekly Budapest Sun. "Before long, you have a group of 12 with nowhere else to go, but wanting to celebrate the holidays in a meaningful way."<br /><br /> Often they gather at the Dohany Street Synagogue.<br /><br /> Inside and out, it's a social scene for Hungarians and expatriates. The Moorish-style synagogue, Europe's largest, packs more than 3,000 people into its ground floor and two balconies. Men sit downstairs; women sit upstairs. After visitors pass the metal detectors at the entrance, the chatting continues even through the service.<br /><br /> But mostly, holidays here for Americans are about food. That's when the work begins.<br /><br /> It starts with the ordeal of finding a host. This might be the only person with a dining room.<br /><br /> Most apartments are modest and cramped. The prospective host sometimes needs coercion, guilt or blackmail to seal the deal.<br /><br /> Holiday meals are typically potlucks. The host usually delegates who should bring what.<br /><br /> But it is not merely a matter of honey cake.<br /><br /> Hosts routinely send out SOS's requesting folding chairs, an extra table or additional silverware—even photocopies of the appropriate prayers.<br /><br /> It takes quite an effort, but there's no alternative. "No one else will do it for you," said Alison Rose, who has also lived here for three years.<br /><br /> "At home it's something your parents usually do," said Rose, a native of Tempe, Ariz., and the managing editor of the East European Constitutional Review. "But here I've had to take a little initiative and be more active."<br /><br /> Rose, 26, said she rarely celebrated holidays when living in the United States. But here in Budapest she even hosted a Passover seder.<br /><br /> "It was more like a dinner party," Rose conceded.<br /><br /> Yet the effort that comes with participation prompts expatriates to rethink and, perhaps, reconnect with their Jewish identity.<br /><br /> Living 5,000 miles from home, many shed familial obligations.<br /><br /> "You can't say, `Oh, my parents are making dinner, so I have to go.' Here you don't `have to go,'" said Pearl Gluck, 25, who grew up in Brooklyn's Chassidic community and now coordinates a Jewish studies lecture series at Budapest's Central European University.<br /><br /> The meal itself is often laid-back. Hungarian girlfriends, boyfriends and even curious non-Jewish friends are often invited.<br /><br /> Through the meal, participants search for friends-in-common and swap holiday stories. Later, a self-congratulatory mood sets in.<br /><br /> "Weren't we clever?" Altman, 43, from Roslyn, N.Y., said to describe the mood. "An event we'd always relied on someone else to do for us, we'd done ourselves. At least we did something."<br /><br /> And that's the point: to do something, says Rabbi Boruch Oberlander, a Lubavitcher thought to be the only U.S. rabbi in Hungary.<br /><br /> His services in Hungarian and Hebrew during the High Holy Days draw just a small handful of Americans, anywhere from two to seven. But he still inserts a few minutes in English.<br /><br /> "A Jew should always feel at home in synagogue, wherever he is in the world," said Oberlander, 31, a Brooklyn native who arrived in Budapest in 1989, just before the collapse of communism.</p> <p> </p>

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