The Ashkenazium is the school for Jewish Studies belonging to the Milton Friedman University in Budapest.
The founders are Rabbi Dr. Slomó Köves, the Executive Rabbi of the United Hungarian Jewish Congregation, and Dániel Bodnár, President of the Milton Friedman University.
The studies at the school are focused on Ashkenazi life and letters. This special focus is based on the conviction that Jewish existence since the Second World War, with its two great demographic and cultural centres in Israel and in America, stands to make considerable gains in self-understanding through interdisciplinary studies of the Jewish people’s millennial sojourn in Europe. The studies avoid both any antiquarian nostalgia for a lost world and any sanguine dreams of an Ashkenazi renaissance. They are oriented by the major questions facing Jews today, turning a critical eye to the rich and complex background of these contemporary questions in European Jewish life and letters.