"The keeper of the keys", I call him. In English, Barnibosht. He spelled his name on the back of a sheet of paper for me, but I could not decipher it.
When we got off the train in Mad (pronounced Mod), little did I know what a treasure was in store. I can hardly speak of it and really hesitate to write about it because words cannot do it justice.
We wandered into this little Hungarian wine town, which from afar, looked like cute little red tile roofs clustered in the rows of vineyards in the Tokaj wine region. Very rural, lined with stone walls and crumbling buildings from the 1700's, we wandered its streets amongst the barking dogs, lonely cow, occasional woman picking from her garden of white daisies and men drinking wine on benches. Russian, Slovakian, Hungarians.
A meeting had been arranged to meet a man who had the keys to the Jewish Synagogue, which was lost in World War II, and is now closed to the public. We had his address and walked to his side yard. It was a gray day and we were strangers, but he quietly (he did not speak a word of English) walked us up the hill past what looked to be a old Jewish seminary. Sitting in the field behind his house was an unassuming white stucco church. He opened the door.
When we entered the synagogue we were silent. There we were, in a place that had been active decades ago. Destroyed and restored. In Hungarian, with hand gestures and a kind smile, Barnibosht tried to explain the history of the synagogue. He pointed to a wall where the names of those killed at Auschwitz were inscribed. There were 800 Jews who lived in Mad at the time of World War II. Now there are zero.
On the main floor of the synagogue was where the men sat. The platform in the center was where the Rabbi would speak and the blue curtain was where the Scrolls were viewed. The women sat upstairs so as not to distract the men. He took us into the room where some artifacts were on display when a young couple just happened to walk in; tourists from Budapest. Jewish. The young girl graciously became our translator. Barnibosht, Catholic, told us how when he was a little boy, his father worked for a Jewish winemaker. He had a lot of Jewish playmates and all of them are now gone. He devoted his last 50 years to preserving their memory by showing the synagogue to visitors who come through.
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