Romanian Jewish actress Maia Morgenstern is one of the stars of the annual Jewish Summer Festival organized in Budapest, Hungary, from 28 August until 4 September.

Morgenstern is perhaps best known to the international audience for her portrayal of the Virgin Mary in Mel Gibson’s movie “The Passion of Christ”. For the festival she will perform in the Yiddish language for Shalom Aleichem’s play “Marienbad”.

The annual Jewish Summer Festival includes a variety of cultural events such as concerts of classical and klezmer music, book and film presentations, theatre, culinary shows and exhibitions.

In an interview with the Hungarian television station M2, Morgenstern said that participating in the festival is a challenge for her as a comedian. “This branch of theatre being a special one, you need a mathematical precision in acting,” Morgenstern said.
 
Multilingual Morgenstern

Maia Morgenstern has acted in dozens of movies where the characters she has portrayed have spoken numerous languages including Romanian, Hungarian, English, French, Yiddish, Aramaic and even ancient Greek.

Morgenstern has starred in an impressive number of Romanian feature films and in several international productions, including Roger Christian’s Nostradamus (1994), Marta Meszaros’ The Seventh Room (1995), Theo Angelopoulos’s Ulysses’s Gaze (1995) and the French-Spanish-Swiss-Romanian film Trahir (1993).

Morgenstern has appeared, for over twenty years on the stage of the Jewish State Theatre in Bucharest and she is a member of the Romanian National Theatre team.
 
Internationally recognised

She received two major awards for her work as a theatre actress; the Stars of Tomorrow Award in 1992 and the 1993 Felix Prize as Best Actress. In 1993, she also won a European Film Award for Best Actress in ’Balanta’ (The Oak).

In 2004, the European Parliament in Strasbourg named Maia Morgenstern “actress and woman of the year”.