Journal Article

Židovské rady na území južného Slovenska v roku 1944 a predseda Židovskej rady v Košiciach

Szeghy-Gayer, Veronika

2025

Overview

Jewish councils played a key role in the ghettoization of the Jewish population in Hungary in 1944. Their activity is still the subject of intense debate in modern historiography. The present study focuses on the Jewish councils in southern Slovakia, with particular attention to the Jewish Council of Košice and its leading personality, Ákos Kolos. The geographical area under investigation is a specifc border region that belonged to the Kingdom of Hungary between 1938 and 1945. The history of this area represents an ignored issue in modern Slovak historiography, including the Jewish councils, which appear sporadically only in commemorative literature and in some smaller case studies. In the first part of the paper, the establishment and the activity of the Jewish Council in Košice is examined, while the second part of the study is dedicated to Ákos Kolos, the chairman of the Jewish Council of Košice, as well as to his career in the interwar years and his post-war fate. The archival materials and personal documents processed in this study will help scholars to better understand the problems that the Jewish Council of Košice had to solve in the weeks between March and June 1944. It is argued, that the regional Jewish elite of southern Slovakia, remained politically loyal to Hungarian government circles, despite the border changes and the Hungarian anti-Jewish legislation.

• Publisher: Slovak Academy of Sciences, Institute of Ethnology
• Subject: Borders / Case studies / Councils / Historiography / Holocaust / Interwar period / Legislation / Personal documents / Personality / Regions / Will