Margit Harsányi is an ESL teacher in Budapest, Hungary.
5 years of teaching at a language school, she became self-employed and is now teaching students aged 14 to 65.
In the past 10 years she has worked as a volunteer for Budapest Pride (an LGBTQ organization) and Around the Table (a Jewish Youth organization).
Margit holds a master's degree in English and American studies and a bachelor’s degree in Special Education from Eötvös Loránd University.
In her spare time she enjoys biking and hiking.
I’ve always known I was Jewish. Even when I didn’t know what that meant I knew I was one. There was no escaping it, really, because the way my paternal grandparents tried to cope with the horrors of the holocaust was to talk about it endlessly. To them it was an almost involuntary act of self-healing, reckoning. To me and my siblings it was a daunting introduction to a heritage through trauma.
As a thirty-something year old Eastern-European Jew I know now that this is a widely common experience for third generation survivors. Whether the family was able to talk about the unspeakable, or whether it remained a taboo topic, many of my Jewish friends struggled with accepting and embracing an identity so intertwined with fear, sorrow and loss.
Throughout my early teenage years came the big questions. What does it even mean that I’m Jewish. My family was not practicing. The last person to observe traditions was my grandfather’s grandma. We didn’t go to the synagogue, we never really ate Kosher. So, in other words, I’m not religious, nor do I belong to a community in its strictest sense. As a thirteen-fourteen year old the single most important question I really wanted an answer to was why do I need to be afraid if I’m not even a “real” Jew?
It wasn’t until I turned seventeen that something clicked in me. As a teenager I started to be aware of the anti-Semitism that started seeping back into the Hungarian political discourse. As an act of defiance I started owning my identity more and more. If there’s hatred and aggression on one side, I am most definitely on the other. But it still wasn’t a positive take. I felt enraged by the slurs I was hearing on the news, the injustice it represented and echoed and I knew that the only powerful tool I had was being truthful to myself and others, and fight the fear that was (and sometimes still is) instilled in me.
At first, my Jewishness was a gateway to focus on other minority issues. I started following the news and public conversation about racial injustice, then turned my attention to women’s issues and LGBTQ activism. I learnt empathy and the importance of speaking up in the face of injustice while still not being able to fully focus on what makes me “me”.
Looking back, I think I needed a little time focusing on other people’s minority identities before I could fully embrace my own. Finally, at the age of 26, I just felt a pull towards the Jewish community. I can’t really explain it. It just felt like the organic next step. Literally, within a few weeks I found myself joining groups and events and trainings with other young Jews of Budapest. I guess I needed to understand that there’s no right way to be Jewish before I could immerse myself in the community.
That was the first time in my life my Jewish identity contained purely positive emotions. The rage, the fear, the confusion was still there, but so was a sense of belonging, confidence and pride.
To be fair, I have a lot of catching up to do. I no longer believe voices (internalized, purist voices) that tell me I can only be a good Jew if I’m a certain way. But I am fascinated and intrigued by all aspects of Jewishness, spiritually and intellectually. And to my surprise, there’s an ever present familiarity I feel whenever I’m learning new things about Judaism.
For a long time the only way I could describe my Jewish identity was that I am a descendent of holocaust survivors. Today, I feel I belong to a larger community as well. A community that survived centuries of hardships and still thrived because of values that were as important to them as they are to me.
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