László Gonda

László Gonda was born in 1910 in Makó

Gonda was born in Makó, Hungary, in 1910, under the family name Gottlieb. His father, Dr. Yosef Gonda, taught at the local high school, and his mother Regina was the daughter of Adolf Frankel, head of the Orthodox union in Hungary. In 1922 his father was dismissed and the family moved to Debrecen.

After his father died, financial hardship led him to give up plans to study art. He studied at the University of Debrecen to become a teacher. In 1935 he married Kati Hunwald, and from 1935 to 1942 he taught history and Latin at the Jewish high school in Debrecen.

In December 1942 he was drafted into Hungarian forced labor service and sent to Ukraine with the Hungarian Second Army. In autumn 1944 a mine badly injured both his feet, and he was brought to Budapest and smuggled into the Jewish hospital in the ghetto. After the war he taught in Budapest and later headed the merged Jewish school there.

He immigrated to Israel in 1951 and settled in Netanya, where he taught at an elementary school and later at the teachers' seminary preparatory school. In 1970 he published a bilingual study of the Jews of Debrecen, and he helped found the Society for Research on the History of Hungarian Jewry. He received the Nordau Prize in 1975 and died in Tel Aviv in 1985.