The old Jewish district, the wartime ghetto, and now the loudest nightlife in the city — all in the same few streets.
Erzsébetváros holds three histories on top of each other and does not always keep them apart.
Jews settled here in numbers from the late eighteenth century, outside the old city walls, and by 1900 Budapest had one of the largest Jewish populations in Europe — around a fifth of the city. The district’s three main synagogues represent three strands of that community: the Neolog Dohány Street Synagogue, the Orthodox Kazinczy Street Synagogue in its Art Nouveau courtyard, and the status quo ante Rumbach Street Synagogue, designed by a young Otto Wagner and reopened after restoration in 2021.
In November 1944 the Arrow Cross government sealed these streets into a ghetto holding some seventy thousand people. It lasted until the Soviet advance reached it in January 1945. A preserved section of the ghetto wall stands in a courtyard on Király utca; you walk in off the street to see it.
Walking it
Start at the Dohány Street Synagogue and work north through Kazinczy, Rumbach and Dob utca. Look into courtyards — the district is built as blocks around inner yards, and much of what is worth seeing is one arch off the pavement. On Dob utca there is a memorial to Carl Lutz, the Swiss vice-consul who issued protective papers to tens of thousands.
The stolpersteine, small brass cobbles set into the pavement outside the last freely chosen homes of the murdered, are throughout.
Eating
The district has become the best place in the city to eat. Mazel Tov and Dobrumba for Middle Eastern; Kőleves for Hungarian with a lighter hand; Karaván street food court beside Szimpla for lángos and sausage. Fröhlich on Dob utca is a kosher bakery of long standing and does flódni, the layered Hungarian-Jewish pastry of apple, walnut and poppy seed.
The friction
The ruin bars brought money and noise into a residential district that is also a memorial district, and that combination is unresolved. Local government has repeatedly debated closing times. Visitors are not the problem so much as the volume of them; walking quietly between venues after midnight is the least anyone can do.
