Census of the Jews of Budapest, 1941 The historical background to the Hungarian census: In January-February 1941 a national population census was conducted in Hungary in accordance with Law No. 30, "The 1941 Census", enacted in 1940. By law a census should be conducted in every city and town throughout Hungary in the apartments of the residents or their houses. The Budapest Székesfőváros Statisztikai Hivatala (Budapest Metropolitan Statistical Office) organized the census in Budapest in accordance with the law. For this purpose, the Statistical Office prepared a special questionnaire including more detailed data regarding the owners of the apartments and the apartments themselves as compared to the data in the questionnaires in the other cities and towns in Hungary. The following data (which can be found in the Yad Vashem data bank) appears in the Budapest questionnaire: A. Data regarding the owner/renter of the apartment: - Name; - Gender; - Profession; - Date of Birth; - Marital Status; - Citizenship; - Religion; - Native Language; - Ethnic Origin (This entry was included in the population census questionnaire for the first time in the history of the census in Hungary); - From what year has he [the person being counted] been in Budapest; - From what year has the person being counted lived in the apartment [in which he has been living since the beginning of 1941]? B. Data regarding the apartment: - Address; - Total amount of the annual rent of the apartment; - Size of the apartment: number of rooms. In the 1941 census, as opposed to the census conducted in 1930, the authorities accepted Yiddish and Hebrew as native languages. Despite this fact, it was difficult to "uncover" the Jewishness of people who had converted. The anti-Jewish legislation of Hungary from the late 1930s defined the converts as Jews. The people in this category usually declared themselves in the census as Hungarian Catholics or Protestants and their mother tongue as Hungarian. The clerks of the Budapest Metropolitan Statistical Office invented an original trick in order to identify these converts in the questionnaire. In the "Remarks" column of the questionnaire, the clerks wrote down the small case letter "i" to signify former "Jew" (izraelita in Hungarian). According to the 1941 census, approximately 185,000 Jews lived in Budapest, as well as approximately 38,000 converts (in greater Hungary at that time, there were approximately 725,000 Jews and approximately 62,000 converts). In the collection there is personal data regarding approximately 220,000 Jews (both Jews of the Mosaic persuasion and those who converted) who were living in the capital city in 1941. History of the collection: When the census was completed, the questionnaires from the census were kept in the Budapest Metropolitan Statistical Office and the Office statisticians used them in order to prepare various summaries regarding the population of Budapest. These summaries were written during the 1940s throughout the war and even afterwards. The documentation was transferred from the Office to the Budapest Főváros Levéltára (Budapest City Archives). What follows is the data from the collection from the Budapest City Archives: Level: Series; Signature: IV.1419.j; Original Title: Az 1941. évi népszámlálás budapesti felvételi és feldolgozási iratainak gyűjteménye; Size of the collection: 79.94 meters; See the original archival catalogue of the series: http://bfl.archivportal.hu/index.php?action=registrum&registrum_action=show_fond&fond_id=667. Between the years 2008 and 2010, the Yad Vashem Archives acquired a microfilm copy of the questionnaires containing data regarding the Jews. Scope of the collection and its contents: In the Collection there are 132 reels containing copies of more than 68,400 questionnaires related to the Jewish residents of Budapest from 1941. Among the questionnaires there are two kinds of apartment ownership: 1. The owner of the apartment or the renter is Jewish, a private person or an institution, a Jewish organization (for example, the Jewish communities in Budapest, the Jewish hospital and more); 2. The owner of the apartment or the renter is not Jewish, but there are members of his family living in the apartment who are Jewish and/or there are Jewish servants (such as a housemaid, a nanny or more). Selected bibliography: 1. Dolányi (Kovács) Alajos, "A keresztény vallású, de zsidó származású népesség a népszámlálás szerint," Statisztikai Szemle, 1944:4-5, pp. 95-103 http://www.ksh.hu/statszemle_archive/viewer.html?ev=1944&szam=04-05&old=21&lap=9 2. Kepecs József, A zsidó népesség száma településenként, 1840-1941. (Budapest: Központi Statisztikai Hivatal, 1993 3. Thirring Lajos, "Az 1941. évi népszámlálás előzetes eredményei," Statisztikai Szemle, 1941:3-4, pp. 155-187. http://www.ksh.hu/statszemle_archive/viewer.html?ev=1941&szam=03-04&old=3&lap=34