The largest synagogue in Europe, with a memorial garden that is also a mass grave.
Built between 1854 and 1859 to a design by the Viennese architect Ludwig Förster, the Dohány Street Synagogue seats around three thousand people and is the largest in Europe. Its style is Moorish Revival — horseshoe arches, geometric brick banding, two onion-domed towers — chosen at a time when European architects reached for an eastern vocabulary for Jewish buildings, an idea that has since been read in several conflicting ways.
Inside it looks more like a basilica than most synagogues: galleries on two levels, an organ, a central aisle. It belongs to the Neolog tradition, the Hungarian reform movement, and the building was contentious among Orthodox Jews for exactly those reasons when it opened. Liszt and Saint-Saëns both played the organ here.
The ghetto
In 1944 the Budapest ghetto was established in these streets, and the synagogue stood inside its wall. In the winter of 1944–45, some two thousand people died in the ghetto of cold, starvation and violence, and were buried in the courtyard because there was nowhere else. The graves are still there, in the garden beside the building — a cemetery next to a synagogue, which Jewish practice would not normally allow, and which exists only because of what happened.
The Tree of Life
In the rear courtyard stands Imre Varga’s weeping willow in steel, each of its several thousand leaves inscribed with the name of a victim. It was funded in part by the Emanuel Foundation, established by Tony Curtis, whose father was Hungarian. Around it are plaques to the righteous who sheltered Jews, including Carl Lutz and Raoul Wallenberg.
The museum
The Hungarian Jewish Museum, built on the site of the house where Theodor Herzl was born, adjoins the synagogue and holds ritual objects, documents and a Holocaust room. It is included in the ticket.
Security is real: bags are searched and there is a queue. Heads are covered for men, and paper kippot are provided. Allow more time than you think — most people go in expecting a building and stay for the rest of it.
