Oradea Jewish Baby Boomers Reunion

A former colleague whom I appreciate for her social skills once told me that reunions are stupid. People you want to keep in touch with, you do anyways, and those you don't, it is probably for a reason. So what's the point? To see how everybody got old and fat? Nostalgia for a younger you? And what's the role of reunions in the age of Facebook and Twitter? With these questions unanswered and despite being way out of my age group, I went to the Oradea Jewish Baby Boomers reunion, held yesterday May 27, 2010 at the Metropolitan hotel in Tel Aviv. It is being organized once every few years, and attended by a different mix of people from many different countries.

As expected, I didn't know most attendees, saw some acquaintances, and had a blast with the usual comment I get at such occasions. Many people there knew my parents and me as a little girl. They look at my name tag (with my maiden name on it) just to make sure I am whom they think I am and say: "You haven't changed a bit since I last saw you, when you were five". I swear I get this comment every single time, and yesterday I  got it more than once. Some add "you have the same face, same curly hair". One sleazy guy went even further with "I was already in love with you when you were five, but didn't say a thing as they'd think I'm a pedophile". Answered the ubiquitous "where did you live in Oradea?" and "where do you live now?" ad nauseam, exchanged phone numbers and email addresses, had some photos taken, chatted with some women around the desserts, all in all a pleasantly spent 3 hours.  Even volunteered to start a Facebook group based on the list of emails I'll get from the organizers. (Today I discovered it's impossible to find friends on FB by hometown).

Towards the end, Dan came from a nearby event he attended, to join us on the way home. After amazing some people there with his Hungarian knowledge, he concluded the event: "everybody there is connected to everybody else in a way - like in a giant spaghetti". How true. If someone would map the relationship between the people there, it would really look like a giant graphical spaghetti showing your connections to people from the neighborhood, the Jewish community, school, the famous 'choir', through someone else...A very special bunch of people sharing the memory of our beautiful hometown and its post-WWII Jewish life, dispersed all over the world, speaking Hungarian, Romanian and at least one or two other languages.

There was this special feeling in the air that even though you don't know many of the attendees personally, you all share a common heritage, something an outsider would find difficult to understand.