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All my life I thought Bela Kun (born Bela Kohn) was a Jew, because people always said he was. Indeed, the joke goes that the Jewish heads of the Hungarian Soviet Republic (c.1919) had Sandor Garbai, a non-Jew, as head of state, so they could have someone to sign death warrants on the Sabbath. But Kun, foreign minister and power-behind-the-throne of the brutal Hungarian communist regime, was not in fact Jewish. His dad was born Jewish, but his mother was a Protestant and he didn't even have connections to a wishy-washy branch of Judaism like reform Judaism, or, seemingly, many, if any, cultural ties to Jewishness. By halakha (traditional Jewish law), in this case not only Orthodox, but also Masorti, Conservative and Reform halakha, he was not Jewish, by his own identification he probably wasn't Jewish, by genetics, he was only as Jewish as he was Magyar.
Just a PSA really.
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