Jewish Survival Along the Danube A Flowing Covenant
- Elijah Goldsobel
- 6 days ago
- 8 min read
The Danube is no straight river. It bends and curves, sometimes calm, sometimes turbulent, yet always moving forward. As I travelled its waters from Vienna to Bratislava to Budapest, I found Jewish history mirrored back to me in its waves: survival in different forms, memory in stone and silence, joy and fragility side by side.
My own journey as rabbi and training barrister, the first to carry an ID from The Honourable Society of The Inner Temple, naming me The Rev Rabbi Goldsobel is no straighter than the river itself. It, too, is made of bends and waves. Along this river, I encountered four kinds of witnesses: the Orthodoxy of Bratislava, the fragile modernity of Budapest, the competing voices of Freud, Herzl, and Frankl in Vienna, and my own encounters with light and darkness in Ohr Zoruah, Belvedere, Helden Platz, and beyond. Together, they revealed not only history but a covenant: Torah and Rule of Law as the twin anchors of resilience.
Bratislava: Orthodoxy and the Anchor of Torah
In Bratislava, Jewish survival is symbolised by what stands and what lies in ruins. The Neolog synagogue is gone, demolished finally in 1969 by Communist planners¹. Yet the mausoleum of the Chasam Sofer (1762–1839) still endures. Born in Frankfurt and brought to Pressburg, he built Bratislava into a citadel of Orthodoxy. His teaching — “Chadash asur min haTorah” (“the new is forbidden by the Torah”) — was no mere slogan, but a safeguarding principle: Jewish continuity rests not in assimilation, but in Orthodoxy, faith, unity, and oneness.²
Bratislava whispers the simplest but hardest truth: assimilation crumbles. Only Torah endures.
Budapest: Neolog Modernity and the Fragility of Openness
Budapest, by contrast, still breathes with Jewish life. The Dohány Street Synagogue — Europe’s largest — remains both a house of prayer and a cultural landmark.³ Around it, memory is everywhere: plaques in Herzl Tivadar Square mark both his birthplace (1860) and the deportation of 440,000 Hungarian Jews in just eight weeks of 1944.⁴
When I arrived, a wedding was underway. Even after I explained my presence, I was told firmly, “Closed for a private event.” At first, I felt excluded. But then I saw it differently: this was safeguarding. In a city where right-wing politics are rising again, survival sometimes means closing the gates, protecting joy, and holding boundaries.
The contrast stayed with me. In Budapest, the continuity is alive, but it carries a fragility. The prayers rise, but without the piercing light that later overwhelmed me in Vienna. Continuity without goosebumps; survival without radiance.
Vienna: Freud, Herzl, and Frankl — Three Witnesses
Vienna presents three witnesses, each showing the difference between resilience and
dissonance: Freud’s illusion of assimilation, Herzl’s political sovereignty, and Frankl’s radical
optimism. Vienna once held more than 200,000 Jews before the war.⁵
Today, barely 8,000–12,000 remain, of whom the majority identify as Orthodox or traditional.⁶ Vienna is therefore both
memory and paradox: the city that nurtured Jewish assimilation, Zionism, and spiritual resilience all at once.
• Sigmund Freud embodied the assimilationist illusion. Visiting his home, now a museum,
I was struck by how much he trusted culture to protect him. Even after the Anschluss in
1938, he resisted leaving. Only his daughter Anna, with international help, forced him to
London, where he died in 1939. Would Freud have survived Auschwitz? It is hard to imagine. His rationalism could analyse suffering, but not sanctify it; it could not give Jews the faith to endure.⁷
• Theodor Herzl, another assimilated Jew, came to Vienna dreaming of becoming a playwright. Shut out of the cultural establishment, he turned disappointment into vision. From Vienna, he launched Der Judenstaat (1896) and the First Zionist Congress (1897), recognising that assimilation was no safeguard. His answer was sovereignty.⁸
• Viktor Frankl represents yet another response. Surviving Auschwitz, he emerged not with despair but with radical optimism. In Man’s Search for Meaning, he wrote that life retains purpose even under the most brutal conditions, if one takes responsibility.⁹ Frankl’s testimony nourished Jewish and human hope alike. His survival was not dissonance, but resilience. Vienna thus presents three witnesses: Freud’s illusion, Herzl’s sovereignty, and Frankl’s optimism. But alongside them, I hear another voice carried down the river from Bratislava the Chasam Sofer insisting that Torah alone is the true anchor.
Light, Darkness, and Fragile Light
In Vienna, history pressed itself upon me with a force I had not expected. I stood in the medieval shul of the Ohr Zoruah, at the ark that had survived centuries, and sang Moshe v’Aharon (Mosse and Aharon). As my voice rose, I felt a current of immense light, a holiness that gave me goosebumps. It was a revival, one of the three resurrections of Jewish Vienna, a sign that Torah still glows even where history has burned. If Bratislava had whispered Orthodoxy’s endurance, here I felt it in my body: goosebumps as I sang Moshe v’Aharon before the ark.
Later, in conversation with a Buchari Jew,¹⁰ I learned another layer of survival. Ashkenazi Jews trace their roots to Central and Eastern Europe, Sephardic Jews to Spain and the Mediterranean, while Buchari Jews come from Central Asia — heirs to a culture of vibrant, passionate prayer and rich expression. In Vienna, my Buchari interlocutor told me that they sometimes feel pressure to restrain that passion in public, saving it for private life with family a restraint their Ashkenazi neighbours need not observe. I also witnessed how difficult it can be for some Ashkenazi Jews to share space with the expressive styles of Buchari or Latin American Jews. Even within survival, the quality of the light differs: some shine brightly, others dim their flame to fit in – and that dimming, too, is a form of dissonance.
Later, in the Belvedere, I stood beneath Baroque frescoes overflowing with painted light angels, clouds, divine splendour. Yet on the floor stood a modern sculpture: metallic heads that reflected the brilliance above, creating brightness but also casting deep shadows. It reminded me: when light is only reflected, when it is constructed or borrowed, it always produces darkness. In the Belvedere, the lesson was clear: painted light above, reflected shadows below human-made splendour always carrying its own darkness.
From there, Helden Platz struck like a void — the place where Hitler declared Anschluss in 1938 to roaring crowds. There, I felt a black hole of darkness, swallowing sound and light alike. The contrast could not have been sharper: the Ohr Zoruah’s Torah radiance, the Belvedere’s reflective shadows, and the void of Helden Platz.
Stepping outside the Hofburg Palace, I saw a flag waving: the banner of the (OSCE) the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe. An institution dedicated to safeguarding rights, dignity, and peace now stands where darkness once triumphed. It is a fragile light, human-made, like the frescoes and sculptures above temporary, conditional, dependent on politics.
Nearby, in a Viennese museum, I encountered a painting¹¹ of justice as allegory: a queen-like figure raised above the people, flanked by lamps, while elites in fine hats paraded below and workers laboured in shadow. It was a vision of law as privilege, of dignity and light belonging only to the few. And here the frustration of the region became clear: access to the divine, to justice, to the Name of God itself, was too often imagined as the property of elites.
As a British barrister-in-training, I know a deeper truth: the Rule of Law is not the ornament of class but the inheritance of all. And as a rabbi, I know this even more deeply: the Name of God is not reserved for the few but belongs to every Jew who stood at Sinai. Where the Danube’s history shows exclusion, Torah and true law restore equality.
Perhaps that is why our own legal tradition, rooted in the Inns of Court, invokes God and Jerusalem alongside Monarch and Country: law is not only civic but sacred.
Resilience or Dissonance?
The Danube teaches that survival can be one of two things.
• Resilience: anchored in Torah, faith, and meaning, able to face suffering without surrendering identity.
• Dissonance: the displacement of danger, the illusion that culture, politics, or borrowed light can keep us safe.
Freud mistook dissonance for safety. Herzl exposed the dissonance and offered sovereignty. Frankl modelled resilience through meaning. The Chasam Sofer, above all, embodied resilience by building Orthodoxy as a fortress. Survival without Torah risks being no more than dissonance. Survival with Torah becomes continuity.
A Flowing Covenant
The Danube flows on, carrying memory, silence, and song. Waves rise and fall, just as Jewish life has — flowering, breaking, returning in new forms.
Bratislava reminded me that Orthodoxy anchors survival. Budapest showed me the fragility of openness, how safeguarding sometimes means closing the gates to protect joy. Vienna spoke with three voices — Freud’s illusion, Herzl’s sovereignty, Frankl’s optimism — and a fourth voice drifting down from Bratislava: The Chasam Sofer, who insisted that only Torah holds us steady.
In Vienna, I also saw with my own eyes the difference between light that endures and light that fades: the Ohr Zoruah’s Torah radiance, the Belvedere’s reflective shadows, the darkness of Heldenplatz, the OSCE’s fragile banner, and the painting of class exclusion. Only Torah and true Rule of Law shine as unbroken lights — lights that belong to all, not to the few.
If Ohr Zoruah glowed with unrestrained light, my conversation with a Buchari Jew revealed how, even today, some feel compelled to dim their flame in public. By contrast, the Ashkenazi posture often hides behind the demise of the past — clinging to memory as a shield, a cold resilience that risks becoming denial rather than renewal.
What I hear in these voices is not a treaty written on paper but a covenant flowing like the river itself. It tells me that survival without Torah is only dissonance, but survival with Torah becomes resilience. It tells me that Orthodoxy, unity, faith, and oneness not only guard the Jewish people; they also sustain cultural tolerance, social cohesion, and security for society at large. This covenant is also the foundation of my work: in my dissertation at City, St George’s University of London, and in the projects of mit.sip Community Interest Company, and in my writing for The Westminster Gazette. I do not sign it with ink, but with the life I am building with the ID that names me as The Rev Rabbi Goldsobel, with the work I do to weave safeguarding into law, with the faith that anchors me against history’s waves. The covenant is simple: reject dissonance, embrace resilience. The Danube’s waters never stop. Neither does this covenant.
¹ Maroš Borský, Synagogue Architecture in Slovakia (Slovak Jewish Heritage Centre 2007)
² Benjamin Brown, ‘The Chatam Sofer and His Legacy’ (2011) Jewish History 25(3).
³ Kinga Frojimovics, Jewish Budapest: Monuments, Rites, History (CEU Press 1999).
⁴ Randolph L Braham, The Politics of Genocide: The Holocaust in Hungary (Columbia University Press 1994).
⁵ Marsha L Rozenblit, The Jews of Vienna, 1867–1914: Assimilation and Identity (SUNY Press 1983).
⁶ Daniel Staetsky, Jews in Austria: A Demographic and Social Portrait (JPR Report, 2020).
⁷ Peter Gay, Freud: A Life for Our Time (Norton 1988).
⁸ Ernst Pawel, The Labyrinth of Exile: A Life of Theodor Herzl (Farrar, Straus & Giroux 1989).
⁹ Viktor E Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning (Beacon Press 2006).
¹⁰ See Zvi Y. Gitelman, A Century of Ambivalence: The Jews of Russia and the Soviet Union (Indiana University Press 2001) ch 5; and Benjamin Pinkus, The Jews of the Soviet Union: The History of a National Minority (Cambridge University Press 1988). Buchari (or Bukharan) Jews are a distinct Jewish community originating in Central Asia, particularly in Bukhara, Samarkand, and Tashkent (modern-day Uzbekistan and Tajikistan). They developed unique liturgical customs and a rich tradition of passionate, expressive prayer, while broadly following Sephardic halakhic rulings. Large communities resettled in Jerusalem in the 19th century and later in New York.
¹¹ The Old and New Gas Lighting, 1900, Carl von Stur.
Very good read thanks