The painter István Farkas was born into a wealthy Jewish family. His father was József Wolfner, the owner of the publishing house Singer and Wolfner. After the death of his father Farkas, leaving behind successful years in France –exhibitions, collectors, a studio in Montparnasse, moved home in 1932 to take over the family business.
Decades earlier, he had been captivated by the sight of the Bay of Szigliget: he finally built his two-storey holiday house on the side of Kamonkő in 1936.The landscape, protected from three sides by the ridge in the shape of a horseshoe, below which lies the bay of Szigliget, impresses all visitors.During the premonitary signs of the war, Farkas found refuge in this environment; he captured the lake that was unaware of the changes in the world, and the mountains surrounding it, on several landscapes.
One of the main works of this period, Memory of the Balaton, is preserved by the Hungarian Jewish Museum and Archives. The painting, in the background of which we can recognize the Fonyód hill, guides us to the unmistakable world of István Farkas where man and landscape are not presented  in symbiotic unity: the fragmented, seemingly lifeless trees are rather witnessing the destruction of ghost-like human figures. István Farkas shows the disappearance of civil society hidden in the view of the Szigliget Bay.
As his 1931 painting In the Garden shows, even though we see realistic compositions in Farkas’s paintings, his dreamlike, dreary scenes become a kind of overturned world stage, where we find ourselves facing an illogical world without any reason, where nature, objects and people are no longer essentially different from each other.
In the details of Memory of the Balaton, the sight also has this atmosphere: the evanescent, mouldering  leaves seem to be the symbols of almost translucent figures in the centre of the picture. Even though the faceless, ghostly figure in the geometric centre of the work gets into the spotlight, it cannot be the protagonist of the picture.
In the paintings of the artist, who had a career in Western-Europe and who later lost his life in the Holocaust, from the 1930s onwards, the human face, the man is just a lifeless fragment of reality, a memory of himself, who cannot shape his own destiny. 
Zsófia Farkas
Translated by Eszter Cseh-Szilárd

 The 50th day after Passover is the feast of Shavuot. We also remember that Judaism became a nation when they got the two stone tablet, the Ten Commandments, at Mount Sinai. According to tradition, we study all night and consume dairy foods during the holiday because the Torah is similar to milk and honey. The colored engraving depicts the scene where the Torah Scroll is shown in front of the community commemorating the giving of the Torah at Mount Sinai. As Shavuot is also the festival of the first harvest, following the tradition reminiscent of this, the synagogue is decorated with green leaves and plants. The Torah ark is used to store the holiest object of the Jewish religion, the Torah scrolls, and is traditionally located int he eastern part of the synagogue, facing Jerusalem. The 18th century Baroque Torah ark belonged to the furnishing of the Köpcsény (today: Kittsee, Austria) Synagogue. The village located in today’s Burgenland belonged to the Esterházy estate, and the community was built in accordance with the privilege given by the prince. In the 17th century, when Jews were not allowed to live in most of the Hungarian towns, they could build houses and a synagogue in the area received by the prince. They could operate the institutions necessary for Jewish life: ritual bath, school, kosher butchery and wine-shop. They enjoyed extensive autonomy in the internal affairs of the community with the consent of the landlord, but were free to choose rabbis and magistrates. The exterior appearance of the Torah ark evokes the style of the artistic furniture manufacturing of the era. It is possible that its maker was one of the carpenters of the princely court, as manorial craftsmen could work on the construction of the synagogue. The separation of the Torah ark and the synagogue space is provided by an ornate Torah ark curtain. The Hebrew name of this object, Parochet, is first mentioned in the description of the First Temple, where it separated the Holy of Holies from the temple area. The curtains of the Second Temple, as described by Josephus Flavius, were embroidered by virgins in the neighborhood of the temple. The Torah ark curtains are reminiscent of the Temple. At parts of the liturgy reminiscent of Jerusalem and the Temple, the community prays facing East, Jerusalem, that is, facing the curtain. The ornamentation of the earliest surviving Torah ark curtains evokes the architectural details of the biblical Temple, and each element has a symbolic meaning. The double twisted columns summon the two columns in front of the Temple, Jachin and Boaz. Grape tendrils are wrapped around the columns, and on top of them there is a bouquet of flowers in a vase. The crown resembles the crown of kings, but on objects related to the Torah it is reminiscent of the term ’Crown of the Torah’. The Parochet has a typically seven-scalloped valance. The traditional name of the Torah Ark valance is kaporeth, which refers to the gold-molded lid of the chest containing the former Ten Commandments.The 18th Century kaporeths are made of textile, with an embroidered image of a piece of furniture of the Temple in each scallops. Aaron’s priestly headdress, The table of 12 sacrificial shewbreads, a copper plate, the stone tablets of the Ten Commandments, Altar of incense, the big golden Menorah, the high priest breastplate of Aaron, the ephod. The parochet originally belonged to the furnishing of the Óbuda Synagogue and was moved from the collection of the Óbuda Jewish Museum to its present location after 1945.

Video made by Eszter Bánfalvi-Orosz, translated by Eszter Cseh-Szilárd. 

​Objects in the video: 
The first Shavuoth in the Dohany street synagogue, etching 
Torah Ark  
Torah Ark Curtain, Parochet  
(and postcards from the Kohn-collection)

This shiviti from Gyöngyös is a papercut; a characteristic piece of East-European Jewish folk art. Papercuts became most popular in the 18th-19th century amongst jewish communities. They were made exclusively by men: pupils in heder, yeshiva students, teachers (melamedim) and their assistants. While paper cuts were mostly painted with watercolors or colored with chalk and then mounted onto a sheet of paper of contrasting dark color paper, the uniquity of our shiviti that it was made of white paper, with only the Hebrew words dominating: typically, the text is citations from the Psalms, or other frequently cited texts. ​

The object on display: Shiviti table

​Lenke Földes is one of the undeservedly forgotten sculptors of the twentieth century. Born in 1896, The artists spent several years in Vienna and later made a career in Paris, her name however, is little known in Hungary. Only one major publication has been written about her to this day, in 1945, with a prologue written by Lajos Kassák. In his writing Kassák emphasized the childlike experimentational spirit of the introverted sculptor and classified her art as one following the most modern trends. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves: who was Lenke Földes and how did the stages of her life unfold?
Lenke née: Sonnenfeld married István Földes, a lawyer in Újpest, in 1912 and was forced to emigrate to Vienna with him, because of his involvement in the Hungarian Soviet Republic. Lenke Földes studied there from Anton Hanak, a teacher at the Vienna school of applied arts, an acclaimed artist of the era, who described the first works of the inexperienced, yet instinctive sculptor as:  Lenke Földes seemed to bite them out with her teeth’. In 1925, the couple was granted amnesty so they could return home, but before long, Földes was already working in Paris at the suggestion of the sculptor Már Vedres. In the French capital, she visited Antoine Bourdelle, a celebrated French sculptor of the era, who immediately gave her an opportunity to exhibit her art. From 1925, she regularly attended Paris’s most prestigious exhibitions. During the 1930 exhibition of her collected works in Paris, Maurice Raynal, the most famous art critic of the time gave a lecture on her art, and the Luxembourg Museum purchased her sculpture titled Motherhood. The first exhibition of the collected works of Lenke Földes in Hungary was held in the autumn of 1959, in the Fényes Adolf Hall in Budapest. The artist later lived in Australia for a long time. Eventually, she died in London at the age of 90.
The central motif of Lenke Földes’s expressive sculptures, mostly made of agalmatolite and marble, was always motherhood and female representation. She modeled standing, sitting, bathing, dancing, sleeping, leaning women, and mothers nurturing, hugging, protecting and sheltering their children. The intimate sculptures, which are often miniature in size, have a monumental effect despite their small size, reflecting the features of modernism, but at the same time, they seem archaic and even primitive due to their block-like nature and the rough and mask-like facial contours. Perhaps these were the characteristics Antoine Bourdelle was referring to when he described Földes’s art as ’block of momentum’. Many of her sculptures and paper sketches are preserved in the collection of the Hungarian Jewish Museum and Archives. Her work, the Crouching Mother, was displayed at the first exhibition of the OMIKE Art Action. The museum also preserves a photo of the inauguration of the statue made by Földes of the politician Vilmos Vázsonyi.
Translated by Eszter Cseh-Szilárd