Budapest, Hungary - Inside the funky Siraly coffeehouse in Budapest's Seventh District, the air is smoky and the tables are crowded with the young, cool, and Jewish.
They are sipping creamed coffees and Hungarian Merlots, chatting about theater and planning a Hanukkah including music from jazz jams to Klezmer and a menorah made from recycled materials. Another evening might offer Hebrew hip-hop, a spirited debate with some of the country's leading intellectuals. Or an Iranian film.
This is the heart of an unconventional revival of Jewish life that is injecting fresh and eclectic energy into the largest Jewish community between Paris and Moscow.
With the horrors of the Holocaust and the atheistic sterility of communism part of a distant past, a new generation of Hungarian Jews is embracing and recasting its Jewish identity, asking questions and posing answers while asserting diversity. Some are teaching their communist-era parents to be believers.
Despite dire predictions that Jewish communities in Europe are dead or dying, depleted by immigration and drowned by persistent waves of anti-Semitism, Budapest, with at least 100,000 Jews, has bucked that trend.
More Jews survived World War II and stuck around in Hungary than in the rest of Central Europe. Today, the Hungarian capital has bustling synagogues, including the world's second largest, Jewish schools, Jewish publications, websites and blogs, and an explosion in cafes, restaurants, and bookstores in the so-called Jewish Triangle, the historic Jewish neighborhoods of the city's central Seventh District that is undergoing something of a renaissance.
There are older Orthodox Jews, middle-aged Neologue Jews (a branch of Judaism indigenous to Hungary) and thousands of secular Jews of all ages.
Many have been experiencing the rediscovery of faith typical in the former Soviet bloc. Others are creating alternative ways of pursuing, if not the faith, at least some of the traditions and meanings of being a Jew. And they chafe at the bureaucracy that has managed formal Jewish affairs in Hungary for years.
"We want to focus on the traditions to recreate a new identity, a new concept of Jewish identity," said Eszter Susan, 29, one of the people running the Siraly coffee house. (The name means Seagull in Hungarian.)
"We are Jewish, and it's nothing to hide," she said, speaking over the noise that bounced off walls covered with posters and abstract paintings.
Like many Hungarian Jews of her generation, she grew up with a vague notion she was Jewish, although not really what that meant.
Adam Schoenberger, who opened the rambling, three-story Siraly last year, said he was casting about for "points of access" for young Jews who, like him, found synagogues with aging congregations to be less than inviting.
"We are trying to change things," said Schoenberger, a wiry man of 27. "We are asking the questions: Who is a Jew and what does that mean?
"We are here. We are alive. We are cool."
Similar motivation led blogger Bruno Bitter, 31, to found the popular website and social network known as judapest.org. He took the name from an anti-Semitic reference made by a Viennese mayor a century ago, turned it on its head, and converted it into something positive, he says.
"I wanted to change the rules and the context of being Jewish in Hungary," Bitter said by e-mail. "I wanted to take 'Jewishness' out of all its negative contexts (like anti-Semitism, the Holocaust, or the Middle East conflict)."
A key reason the Jewish community in Budapest has the luxury to flourish and experiment is sheer numbers, said Edward Serotta, head of the Vienna, Austria-based Central Europe Center for Research and Documentation, which is collecting the history of Jewish life in Europe for the past century.
Jews were exterminated throughout the Hungarian countryside in World War II, but many were spared in Budapest, faring better than in most neighboring countries. And Hungarian communism was less repressive than in other places, allowing the Soviet bloc's only rabbinical seminary to continue to operate.
But only after the fall of communism in 1989 did many Hungarian Jews begin to return to their faith, a process often led by the younger generations.
At their second-floor walk-up in the Seventh District, four generations of the Sardi family come together on a Friday evening for Shabbat dinner and the lighting of candles.
Dora Sardi, 33, a historian, has reinvigorated faithful observance in the family. Her grandfather, a Holocaust survivor, felt it necessary to repress his faith; his son, Dora's father, wanted nothing to do with religion.
"My mother was educated by her grandmother, so she knew a little more about the traditions. But my father didn't want to hear about it," Dora Sardi said. "We celebrated Christmas for a few years, and then nothing at all for several years.
"Slowly, slowly, we are finding the way back."
Her father, Gyula Sardi, 60, said he always knew he was a Jew, "But it was a kind of secret."
Wearing an oversized white-silk "kippah," or skull cap, Gyula found it somewhat amusing that it is his daughter now teaching him how to worship.
"To have this from your children is unusual," he said. "Usually the parents give religion to the child, not the other way around. We inherited it from our children."