Dohány Street Synagogue: The Largest in Europe
Why is it significant?
Stand across the street and take in the facade of red and yellow brick, striped like a Moorish palace, between two towers crowned with onion domes. Above the entrance, a rose window. This is the Dohány Street Synagogue, also called the Great Synagogue, the largest synagogue in Europe.
Key Facts
| Place | Dohány Street Synagogue: The Largest in Europe |
|---|---|
| Address | Dohány utca 2, 1074 Budapest, Hungary |
| Geo Coordinates | 47.49600, 19.06060 |
| Part of Walk | Three Synagogues and a Tree of Life: Budapest's Jewish Quarter from Gozsdu to Dohány Street |
| Generated | Generated |
Stand across the street and take in the facade of red and yellow brick, striped like a Moorish palace, between two towers crowned with onion domes. Above the entrance, a rose window. This is the Dohány Street Synagogue, also called the Great Synagogue, the largest synagogue in Europe.
It was designed by the Viennese architect Ludwig Förster and built between 1854 and 1859. Förster believed that a Jewish house of worship should not imitate a church, and looked instead to the architecture of Islamic Spain and the Near East, with the towers rising to about forty-three metres. Inside there are close to three thousand seats, men below and women in the galleries, and an organ, a sign that this was a Neolog synagogue. The story goes that Franz Liszt and Camille Saint-Saëns both played it.
Now look at the building to its left. On this spot stood the house where, in 1860, Theodor Herzl was born. He grew up here, went to Vienna, became a journalist, and wrote The Jewish State, the book that launched political Zionism. Herzl's birthplace is gone; the Hungarian Jewish Museum, built in the early 1930s, now stands there.
In the winter of 1944 the synagogue lay inside the ghetto. Its spaces sheltered people, and all around it people were dying of cold, hunger and disease. When the ghetto was liberated in January 1945, the dead could not be taken to a cemetery, so they were buried in the synagogue's own garden. More than two thousand people lie there in mass graves, an extraordinary thing in Jewish tradition, which normally keeps burial places away from houses of prayer.
After decades of decay, the synagogue was restored in the 1990s, partly with money raised by Hungarian Jews abroad. Behind it, along Wesselényi utca, is a garden you will come back to at the very end of this walk. For now, walk west to the big boulevard, Károly körút, turn right and follow it north to a giant archway.