1947
Noémi Munkácsi (Budapest, 1903 - Jerusalem, 1966) was an accredited teacher, poet, writer, one of the the first university-educated women in the Munk family. In Nagykanizsa, where her husband, Dr. Ernő Winkler, served as rabbi, she became the driving force behind the local Jewish women’s association. Among other works, she published her poems in the volume Conversations with God (1942), and she wrote a biography of her father, A Great Hungarian Linguist: Bernát Munkácsi’s Life (1943). In April 1944, Noémi, Dr. Winkler, and their two teenage children were rounded up by the Hungarian Gendarmerie and deported to Auschwitz. Her husband and son, Gábor, were murdered by the Nazis. Noémi and her daughter, Szonja, immigrated to Israel in 1951.
Noémi Munkács’s observations from the realm of cultural anthropology
Saturday rituals
“There were times when we used a carved potato, filled with margarine and a makeshift wick made of rags stuck in the middle to provide the festive light.
At other times, when we worked as a laborer at an armory, we used for lighting on Saturdays the oil from the plant with which we cleaned the machinery. At other KZ facilities, inmates used horse tallow to substitute for gentle candles. …
The ingenuity of Jewish women also in this context was inexhaustible. Still, there were times when it was impossible to acquire candles. At such times, they lit up the Shabbat candles symbolically. I participated twice on such symbolic lighting ceremonies. On a dark, foggy Friday night in November 1944, our unit was off to start our long, twelve-hour shift at the armory. … A young woman from Upper Hungary, standing close to me, remarked:
- I’ve just lit the Shabbat candles!
I was astonished. How so?
-I looked at two bulbs, and I recited the blessings–she explained.
On another occasion when we were working at the plant well into Saturday dawn, I observed a woman from Sighet, who was tasked with polishing tiny iron rings. She organized them into tile-like candle sticks and candles, and leaned over them and recited the Shabbat blessing.”
Amulets, magical signs
“At the concentration camp in Thor they made a bread bag from a Shabbat challah cover, found with a Russian woman. It had magical qualities: it never ran out of bread.
In the summer of 1944, mysterious news spread at the Auschwitz concentration camp: according to the prophesy of a buried note, if women wore yellow rings and girl wore red rings, liberation would come by tisha b’av. Needless to say, everybody has worn red and yellow rings made of rags since then.”
(Source: W. MunkácsI, Noémi, „Zsidó szertartások és népszokások a német női haláltáborokban” (Jewish rituals and folk customs in the death camps) In: Löw Immánuel emlékkötet (Immanuel Löw Festschrift) (Budapest, 1947), pp. 319, 322-323)