Breakfast in the Jewish Quarter

If I had forgotten that we were in the Jewish quarter of Budapest, I was reminded this morning at breakfast. At the end of the restaurant is a beautiful Christmas display. It’s especially interesting because we are here in the middle of the Jewish ghetto. The remarkable thing about the display is that there is a large Christmas tableau featuring snow, a nutcracker and a book with a Hebrew inscription on the right hand page, which is translated into Spanish on the left. My Spanish is less rusty than my Hebrew now, so I was able to decipher that it wished peace and blessings to everyone in this holiday season. I suppose this simply goes to show that Christmas is no longer an exclusively Christian celebration. It has become a midwinter feast for people of every religious persuasion. It also shows that the Jews here are Sephardic Jews from Spain, rather than Ashkenazi Jews from Poland. There is an extremely beautiful old synagogue around the corner. It is made entirely of brick, but the masonry is amazing. It’s not open for tours today because since it is Saturday, services are being held for the Sabbath. Nevertheless, if we had any questions about the ethnicity of the neighborhood we were in, they were answered at breakfast this morning.Read more