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pages of documentation and catalogued almost 170,000 files, expanding its current archives with a plethora of information about the Jewish communities that once existed and thrived in Hungary.
One interesting story revealed by the project was that of Sámuel Léderer and his younger brother, Rezső, who were born in the small village of Magyarmecske in Baranya County. In 1940, only 13 Jews lived in Magyarmecske, amongst 185 Roman Catholics and 330 Calvinists.
Sámuel actively participated in the public life of his village and the county. For decades, he was a magistrate of the village, and for 40 years, he was a member of the county council of Baranya. Both of the Léderer brothers farmed their land, which they had inherited from their father in 1910.
In 1939, the Second Anti-Jewish Law in Hungary was passed
fingerprint, is the only piece of his father’s writing Herzl owns."
Dr. Avram reminds us that some 600,000 Jews from Greater Hungary were murdered during the Holocaust. "This number represents approximately one out of every ten victims of the Holocaust and one in every three victims of the gas chambers at Auschwitz-Birkenau, where the overwhelming majority of deported Hungarian Jews were sent."
The project was co-ordinated by experts in Yad Vashem and supported by two professional teams abroad. "One team in Hungary, led by two renowned experts with 12 researchers; and another group in Transylvania, led by a well-known expert with three researchers. The privacy laws in Hungary changed at the outset of the project providing full access to all relevant information throughout Hungary, but we knew that under different circumstances this could reverse," said Dr. Haim Gertner, Director of the Yad Vashem Archives.
The success of this project uncovered more than a list of names. During the project, Yad Vashem has copied 2,463,000 pages