Jan 16, 2018

Hungary’s Jewish Community: Revitalized Through Your Support

Your support of the Annual Federation/UJA Campaign is helping revitalize and strengthen Hungary’s Jewish community. Through its Mozaik Hub, our overseas partner, the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, offers support to emerging grassroots initiatives working to advance Jewish life in that former Soviet Union country. Hungarian Jewish professionals also benefit through weekly lessons on best practices in areas like project management, financial planning, marketing and more. In less than two years, Mozaik has already helped launch a number of powerful initiatives, including a female-focused Talmud learning program and a “charity taxi,” which helps volunteers deliver donations of clothing and household items to those in need.

“In Budapest, the Mozaik Hub is becoming the professional backbone of the
NGO sector,” said Marcel Kenesei, who leads Centropa Foundation, one of five nonprofits housed at the Hub. Centropa is a nonprofit Jewish historical institute dedicated to preserving 20th century Jewish family stories and photos from Central and Eastern Europe and the Balkans.

In 2016, the Hub touched 150 organizational, professional and volunteers — providing a total of 500 hours of consultancy and mentoring to its five resident organizations, nine affiliated organizations, five “Hub-Up” start-up initiatives and three partner institutions and programs. These organizations, in turn, reach thousands of other participants — a powerful ripple effect. “Mozaik is the first initiative in Hungary to not only provide funding for promising Jewish projects and organizations, but also to nurture and train them in how to be more sustainable, how to enhance their impact, how to think and plan strategically — in other words, how to grow up and improve as a Jewish nonprofit,” added Kenesei.