Pinchas Freudiger

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Pinchas Freudiger, also Fülöp Freudiger, Philip von Freudiger (born 1900 in Budapest, Austria-Hungary, died 1976 in Israel) was a Hungarian-Israeli manufacturer and Jewish community leader.

Pinchas Freudiger^[1] was the son of Abraham Freudiger (1868-1939). His grandfather, textile manufacturer Mózes Freudiger (1833-1911), helped found the Orthodox Jewish community in Budapest and was elevated to noble status. Pinchas Freudiger studied and entered the family business.

He was a member of the Orthodox Jewish council in Budapest, succeeding his father as council chairman upon his father’s death in 1939.

Starting in 1938, the authoritarian Horthy regime of Hungary tightened antisemitic laws enacted to isolate Jews.

After the German invasion of Poland in 1939, thousands of Polish Jews fled to Hungary.^[2] Freudiger and others created support organizations^[3] to aid them. Meanwhile, many Hungarian Jews continued to believe in their own safety, despite deepening antisemitism in the country.

During Operation Barbarossa in 1941, the Jewish men were not recruited for the Hungarian army, but used in forced labor battalions often stationed behind or at the front.

In 1942, after intense pressure by Rabbi Chaim Michael Dov Weissmandl of the Bratislava Working Group, Hungary’s orthodox Jewish community — under Freudiger’s leadership — financially aided persecuted Jews in Slovakia, paying a ransom to the Nazis to stop transports of Slovakian Jews to Auschwitz. Those transports stopped for two years.

After the German occupation of Hungary on March 19, 1944, Freudiger and Samu Stern^[4] were appointed by the Germans as representatives of the orthodox and Neologue Jewish communities on the Jewish Council (Judenrat, Zsidó tanács) in Budapest. The Jewish Council was among recipients of the Vrba–Wetzler report, also known as the Auschwitz Protocols, the Auschwitz Report. It detailed the atrocities in Auschwitz.^[5] Much like Rezső Kasztner (aka Rudolf), members of the Jewish Council failed to publicize the atrocities or warn Hungarian Jews of their impending fate.

Freudiger and his family escaped to Palestine via Romania in August 1944 in coordination with high-ranking SS officers Dieter Wisliceny and Hermann Krumey [de].^[6] They warned Freudiger that Adolf Eichmann hated him, partly because of his red beard, and intended to imminently put him on a transport.^[7]

He testified at the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem.^[8]

• Randolph L. Braham: The Politics of Genocide: The Holocaust in Hungary. New York: Columbia University Press, 1981
• Mária Schmidt: Kollaboráció vagy kooperáció? A Budapesti Zsidó Tanács. Budapest:: Minerva, 1990 ISBN 963-223-438-3
• Randolph L. Braham: Freudiger, Fülöp, in: Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, 1990, Vol. 2, p. 532
• Freudiger, Fülöp, in: Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, 1993, Volume 1, p. 497
• Freudiger, Fülöp, in: Walter Laqueur (ed.): The Holocaust encyclopedia. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 2001, ISBN 0-300-08432-3, p. 225