Budapest Guide
Terézváros and Erzsébetváros
The Dohány utca Synagogue
Opening time: April– Oct Mon– Thurs 10am–5pm, Fri 10am–3pm, Sun 10am–6pm; Nov– March Mon– Thurs 10am–3pm, Fri & Sun 10am–2pm
Price: 1600Ft, includes admission to the Jewish Museum
Address: Dohány utca
The splendid Dohány utca Synagogue (Dohány utcai Zsinagóga) is one of the landmarks of Pest. It is Europe's largest synagogue and the second biggest in the world after the Temple Emmanuel in New York, with 3600 seats and a total capacity for over 5000 worshippers. It belongs to the Neolog community, a Hungarian denomination combining elements of Reform and Orthodox Judaism. Today, eighty percent of Hungarian Jewry are Neologs, but their numbers amounted to only twenty percent before the Holocaust, which virtually wiped out the Orthodox and Hassid communities in the provinces. Neolog worship includes features that are anathema to other denominations, not least organ music during services.
The building epitomizes the so-called Byzantine-Moorish style that was popular in the 1850s, and attests to the patriotism of Hungarian Jewry – the colours of its brickwork (yellow, red and blue) being those of Budapest's coat of arms. In the 1990s the synagogue was restored at a cost of over $40 million; the work was funded by the Hungarian government and the Hungarian-Jewish diaspora.
You have time to admire the gilded onion-domed towers while waiting to pass through a security check, before entering the magnificent interior by Frigyes Feszl, the architect of the Vigadó concert hall. Arabesques and Stars of David decorate the ceiling, the balconies for female worshippers are surmounted by gilded arches, and the floor is inset with eight-pointed stars. The layout reflects the synagogue's Neolog identity, with the bemah, or Ark of the Torah, at one end, in the Reform fashion, but with men and women seated apart, according to Orthodox tradition. On Jewish festivals, the place is filled to the rafters with Jews from all over Hungary, whose chattering disturbs their more devout co-religionists. The hall is also used for concerts of classical or klezmer music, as advertised outside and on www.jewishfestival.hu.
The cemetery behind the synagogue only exists at this spot because the Nazis forbade Jews from being buried elsewhere – one of many calculated humiliations inflicted on the Jewish quarter (by then a walled ghetto) by the local SS commander, Eichmann. Some 2281 Jews are interred beneath simple headstones, erected immediately after the Red Army's liberation of the ghetto on January 18, 1945.