Three Synagogues and a Tree of Life: Budapest's Jewish Quarter from Gozsdu to Dohány Street

Erzsébetváros on foot: the rescuers Sztehlo, Lutz and Wallenberg, the ghetto wall of 1944, Otto Wagner's and the Löffler brothers' synagogues, a market hall, the ruin bars and Europe's largest synagogue

Budapest · 11 stops · 25 min audio · Generated

  1. 1. Deák Ferenc tér: Pastor Sztehlo and the Children

    Deák Ferenc tér 4, 1052 Budapest, Hungary

    Find the bronze figure of a man in a long coat near the Lutheran church on Deák Ferenc tér, with children close around him. Trams screech, the metro breathes out crowds, and almost nobody stops. This is Gábor Sztehlo, a Lutheran pastor, and he is the right person to open a walk into the Jewish quarter of Budapest.

    In the spring of 1944 Germany occupied Hungary, and within weeks the deportations of Jews from the countryside began. By the autumn, Budapest's Jews were the last large Jewish community left in the country, and after the Arrow Cross seized power in October, nowhere in the city was safe. Sztehlo, working under the protection of the Lutheran and Red Cross networks, began renting villas and flats, mostly in Buda, and turning them into children's homes.

    Into those homes went Jewish children with false papers and Christian names, mixed in with genuine orphans and refugees. Sztehlo and his helpers moved them from house to house as raids came closer, forging papers and begging for food. Accounts usually say he saved around fifteen hundred children and a few hundred adults. He was not alone: diplomats, nuns, priests and ordinary neighbours did the same, and you will meet some of them on this walk.

    After the siege, he gathered war orphans into a children's republic in Buda that he called Gaudiopolis, the City of Joy, where the children elected their own parliament and ran their own courts. It lasted until 1950, when the communist state took it over. In 1972 Yad Vashem in Jerusalem recognised him as Righteous Among the Nations, and he died in Switzerland in 1974.

    Keep him in mind as you go. Now cross the busy junction and walk east into Király utca, the long street that leads into Erzsébetváros, the seventh district. At number 13, on your right, an archway opens into a chain of courtyards.

  2. 2. Gozsdu Courtyard and the Ghetto Wall on Király utca

    Király utca 13, 1075 Budapest, Hungary

    Step through the archway at Király utca 13 and the city noise drops away. In front of you, a passage runs straight through the block, from courtyard to courtyard, all the way to Dob utca on the other side. By night it is one of the busiest strips of terraces in Budapest. By day you can still read the old architecture.

    This is the Gozsdu udvar, completed in 1901 to designs by Győző Czigler. Its name is a surprise in a Jewish quarter: Manó Gozsdu, or Emanuil Gojdu, was a lawyer of Romanian origin who left his fortune to a foundation for the education of young Romanian Orthodox students. The foundation built this complex as rental property, with flats above and shops and workshops around the courtyards, many of them run by Jewish tradesmen.

    In late November 1944 the Arrow Cross regime ordered the Jews of Pest into a closed ghetto in these streets. It was sealed on 10 December. About seventy thousand people were crammed into a few dozen blocks, in freezing flats with almost no food, fuel or medicine.

    The boundary ran through this neighbourhood, and fences and walls cut through courtyards and gateways. Next door, in the courtyard of Király utca 15, a stretch of the ghetto wall has been preserved and partly rebuilt as a memorial, with a plaque. It stands inside a residential building, so the gate is often locked... if it is, simply pause at the door. It is one of the very few physical traces of the ghetto left in the city.

    Now look again at the passage, the strings of lights, the people laughing over drinks. That is the strange double life of this quarter, and you will feel it all afternoon: memorials and nightlife sharing the same walls. Come back out to Király utca and continue east along it, past the shopfronts, for a few minutes, to where the street begins to curve.

  3. 3. Király utca: The King's Street Between Two Districts

    Király utca 47, 1077 Budapest, Hungary

    Stand on the pavement of Király utca and look along it in both directions. Two- and three-storey houses from the early nineteenth century lean shoulder to shoulder with grand apartment blocks of 1900, design shops, bakeries, the odd closed-up gateway. It is not a pretty street, exactly... it is a street that has always been working.

    To understand why there is a Jewish quarter here at all, picture the old walled town of Pest, ending more or less where the ring boulevard runs today. For a long time Jews were not permitted to live inside it. From the 1780s, under Emperor Joseph II, they were allowed to settle in Pest, and many did so just outside the walls, in this new suburb. Király utca became their high street: cloth merchants, tailors, furriers, coffee houses, prayer rooms up in the courtyards.

    Here is a detail almost nobody notices. In 1882 the growing suburb of Terézváros was split in two, and the new half was named Erzsébetváros, after Queen Elisabeth, the empress everyone called Sisi. The line between the districts was drawn down the middle of this street. So the houses on one side belong to the sixth district and those on the other to the seventh, facing each other across a few metres of cobbles and tarmac.

    In the winter of 1944 the street mattered in a far darker way, because the northern edge of the ghetto ran along it, through its courtyards and gateways. A few metres could decide who was locked in and who was not. After the war many survivors left, and under communism the quarter slowly crumbled, its courtyards neglected, its shops nationalised.

    Since the 1990s Király utca has come back to life, first with furniture and design shops, then with cafés. Look up at the facades as well as the windows... the street is still a catalogue of two centuries. Now walk back to the corner of Kazinczy utca and turn south down it. Halfway along the block, an unusual facade rises between the apartment houses.

  4. 4. Kazinczy Street Synagogue: The Orthodox Heart

    Kazinczy utca 29-31, 1075 Budapest, Hungary

    Stop in front of the tall facade squeezed between the apartment houses of Kazinczy utca. It has no domes and no Moorish towers. Instead, look for clean vertical lines, Art Nouveau ornament, and Hebrew lettering above the entrance. This is the Kazinczy Street Synagogue, and it tells a story of a community that split in two.

    In 1868 and 1869 the Jews of Hungary held a congress to organise their community life, and they could not agree. The reformers, who would be called the Neologs, accepted organs, sermons in Hungarian and a modernised service. The traditionalists refused, and formed their own Orthodox organisation. A third group stayed outside both camps and was known simply as status quo ante, the way things were before. Budapest's Jewish quarter ended up with a great synagogue for each of the three, and you will see all of them today.

    This is the Orthodox one, built in 1912 and 1913 by the brothers Béla and Sándor Löffler. Behind it lies a whole community complex of offices and institutions, around a courtyard that reaches through the block to Dob utca. The Löfflers managed something difficult: a strictly traditional prayer house dressed in the most modern style of its day.

    During the ghetto winter the building stood inside the closed zone, and the community's own institutions tried to feed and shelter people in desperate conditions. The synagogue survived the war damaged but standing. Unlike many prayer houses in the city, it never stopped being used, and it is still the centre of Orthodox Jewish life in Budapest.

    If you pass on a Friday afternoon, you may see men hurrying along Kazinczy utca before the Sabbath begins, past tourists heading to the bars a few doors away. Two worlds, one pavement. Now continue to Dob utca, turn left, and follow it east to a leafy square with a long market hall on its far side.

  5. 5. Klauzál tér and Its Market Hall

    Klauzál tér 11, 1072 Budapest, Hungary

    Walk into Klauzál tér and let the city slow down around you. Plane trees, a playground, benches with retired neighbours, dog walkers doing their rounds. On the far side stands a long brick and iron market hall. It feels like the most ordinary square in Budapest, and that is exactly why it matters.

    The square is named after Gábor Klauzál, a minister in Hungary's first responsible government of 1848. The market hall opened in 1897, one of the first district markets the city built that year, when Budapest decided to move its food trade off the streets and under roofs. For generations this was where the quarter shopped: poultry, fish for the Sabbath, vegetables, gossip. Today there is a supermarket inside, but the old hall still frames it.

    In the winter of 1944 the square lay in the middle of the ghetto. Tens of thousands of people were living in the surrounding blocks with almost nothing to eat, and as the siege of the city closed in, hunger, cold and disease killed thousands. There was no way to bury the dead properly, and bodies lay in courtyards across the ghetto for weeks.

    A memorial to the victims of the Pest ghetto now stands on the square. Find it, and read it slowly, while children shout on the climbing frames a few metres away. The Red Army reached the ghetto on 18 January 1945, and the survivors walked out into a ruined city.

    After the war the square slowly became just a square again. Families moved in who had no connection to the old quarter, the market changed hands, and the memory sank into the walls. In the last twenty years the neighbourhood has filled with students, bars and new money, and Klauzál tér is one of the places where all of them still meet the old residents. Now leave the square to the south, turn right along Wesselényi utca, and then left into Kazinczy utca. Watch for a crumbling building with a very unusual guest list.

  6. 6. Kazinczy utca and the Birth of the Ruin Bars

    Kazinczy utca 14, 1075 Budapest, Hungary

    Look through the gateways along this stretch of Kazinczy utca. Behind peeling facades you may glimpse courtyards strung with lights, old bathtubs turned into sofas, mismatched chairs, bicycles hanging from walls and plants growing out of broken windows. Welcome to the home of the ruin bars, or romkocsma in Hungarian.

    They are a direct consequence of everything you have heard so far. After 1945 the quarter lost most of the people who had made it, and under communism its old houses were nationalised, divided up and left to decay. By the 1990s whole buildings stood empty, waiting for developers who wanted to tear them down. In the early 2000s a few groups of friends had a simple idea: rent a condemned building cheaply for a summer, drag in any furniture they could find, and open a bar.

    It worked beyond anyone's dreams. One of the first and most famous, founded in 2002, moved a couple of years later into an old building on this very street, and visitors from all over the world began arriving to see it. Others followed in empty houses and courtyards all over the seventh district. Some are still chaotic and cheap, some have become polished, and several host markets, film nights and concerts by day.

    Not everyone was happy. Long-time residents complained about noise and crowds, and the district argued for years about how to balance nightlife with the people who live here. Others point out that the bars saved buildings that would otherwise have been demolished, and kept the old courtyards alive when no one else wanted them.

    Stand still for a moment and notice what you are standing in: a street where the Orthodox synagogue, kosher shops and party crowds share a few hundred metres. Almost nowhere else in Europe does Jewish history sit this close to a night out. Now continue south to the end of Kazinczy utca and turn right into Dohány utca. Two onion-domed towers will appear above the rooftops.

  7. 7. Dohány Street Synagogue: The Largest in Europe

    Dohány utca 2, 1074 Budapest, Hungary

    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.

  8. 8. Madách Imre tér: The Avenue That Was Never Built

    Madách Imre tér, 1075 Budapest, Hungary

    Stand in front of the huge archway on Madách Imre tér and look up. It is a gateway several storeys high, set in a block of tall modernist apartment houses. Behind it you expect a grand boulevard... and instead you get a short avenue that stops after a couple of hundred metres. That disappointment is the whole story.

    On this spot, until the 1930s, stood the Orczy House, a sprawling building that for over a century was a hub of Jewish Pest. In its courtyards and rooms there were prayer houses, shops, coffee houses and offices, and merchants arriving from the provinces did business here. In the 1930s it was demolished to make way for something modern.

    The new plan was ambitious: a straight, wide avenue called Madách Imre út, running from the boulevard right through the old streets of the Jewish quarter towards the outer ring. The arch was meant to be its triumphant entrance. The first section was built in the late 1930s, with these monumental houses on either side. Then came the war, and the rest of the avenue was never built.

    It is hard to stand here and not think about what that plan would have meant. Cutting an avenue through the quarter would have erased a whole web of courtyards, prayer rooms and workshops. History did the erasing differently, and far more terribly, a few years later. The old streets survived; most of their people did not.

    The square is named after Imre Madách, the nineteenth-century author of The Tragedy of Man, a play in which Adam travels through all of human history and keeps losing hope... and is told at the end to strive and to trust. Fitting enough for this gateway. Walk through the arch now and follow the short avenue to its end, at Rumbach Sebestyén utca. Look out for an octagonal facade in Moorish stripes.

  9. 9. Rumbach Street Synagogue: Otto Wagner's Octagon

    Rumbach Sebestyén utca 11-13, 1075 Budapest, Hungary

    Turn to face the facade on Rumbach Sebestyén utca: stripes of colour, two slender minaret-like towers, horseshoe arches and Hebrew inscriptions. It looks almost too exotic for a narrow side street. And it was designed by a man who would later become one of the fathers of modern architecture.

    The Rumbach Street Synagogue was built between 1869 and 1872, and its architect was the young Otto Wagner from Vienna. Decades later Wagner would design the Post Office Savings Bank and the metro stations of Vienna, stripped-down buildings that pointed the way to the twentieth century. Here he was still in his twenties, and he gave the community a Moorish fantasy built around an octagon, a centralised space crowned by a dome.

    It belonged to the third of the communities you heard about on Kazinczy utca, the status quo ante Jews, who refused to join either the Neologs or the Orthodox after 1869. So within a few hundred metres, the quarter has three great synagogues, one for each answer to the same question: how to be Jewish in a modern city.

    The war and the decades after it were cruel to this building. Under communism the congregation dwindled, and the building was sold, half-converted, left empty and sealed off. For years it was a shell, its paint peeling, birds flying through the dome.

    Then, after a long restoration, the synagogue reopened in 2021, both as a place of prayer and as a cultural centre, its colours bright again. If the doors are open, step in and look up into the octagon, an unusual shape for a synagogue, which gathers the whole congregation under a single dome. Now walk round the corner into Dob utca and head east for a few steps. Look for a golden figure against a wall, reaching down towards someone on the ground.

  10. 10. Carl Lutz Memorial: The Angel and the Fallen

    Dob utca 12, 1072 Budapest, Hungary

    On Dob utca, find the sculpture: high on the wall a golden angel leans down, letting a long ribbon of cloth fall towards a figure lying on the ground below. The figure is bronze and dark. The angel is gilded and bright. It is a memorial to a Swiss diplomat called Carl Lutz.

    Lutz arrived in Budapest in 1942 as Swiss vice-consul. Switzerland was neutral, so his office looked after the interests of countries at war with Hungary, including Britain and the United States. He had already helped Jewish children leave for Palestine, and after the German occupation in March 1944 he negotiated permission to issue several thousand protective letters to Jews with emigration papers.

    Then he did something bold. He treated the permission as covering whole families rather than individuals, and kept reusing the same numbers, so that the paper protected far more people than the Germans had agreed to. He declared dozens of apartment buildings in Pest to be annexes of the Swiss legation and filled them with people under protection. The best known, the Glass House on Vadász utca, sheltered thousands. Estimates of how many Lutz saved run into the tens of thousands.

    There are accounts of Lutz and his wife going to the riverbank and to the brickworks where deportees were gathered, pulling people out of the columns because they held, or claimed to hold, Swiss papers. He worked alongside others: the Swede Raoul Wallenberg, the Italian Giorgio Perlasca, papal and Red Cross representatives, Hungarian helpers whose names are mostly forgotten.

    At home, his superiors in Bern criticised him for exceeding his authority. Recognition came slowly: in 1964 Yad Vashem named him Righteous Among the Nations. Stand under the angel for a moment and look at the gap between her hand and the fallen man. Then walk on along Dob utca, turn right and head one block south to Wesselényi utca, to the garden behind the great synagogue where this walk ends.

  11. 11. Heroes' Temple, Raoul Wallenberg Memorial Park and the Tree of Life

    Wesselényi utca 7, 1074 Budapest, Hungary

    Through the railings on Wesselényi utca, look into the garden behind the Great Synagogue. A weeping willow stands there, made of steel, its branches bowed, every one of its thousands of silver leaves engraved with a name. This is the Tree of Life, the heart of the Raoul Wallenberg Memorial Park.

    Beside it rises the Heroes' Temple, a smaller domed synagogue built in 1929 to 1931 by László Vágó and Ferenc Faragó. It remembers around ten thousand Hungarian Jewish soldiers who died fighting for their country in the First World War. Hold on to that number. Twenty-five years after those men died for Hungary, their families were deported from it.

    The tree is the work of the sculptor Imre Varga, unveiled around 1990. It was paid for with the help of a foundation set up by the actor Tony Curtis, whose father came from Hungary, and the names on the leaves are those of victims of the Holocaust, added by families who wanted them written down somewhere. Nearby, memorials honour the Righteous Among the Nations, rescuers like the ones you have met today, and above all the man who gave the park its name.

    Raoul Wallenberg came to Budapest from Sweden in July 1944. Like Lutz, he issued protective passes and set up Swedish safe houses, and he is credited with saving thousands of lives. In January 1945, as the Soviet army took Pest, he went to meet its commanders and was taken into custody. He never came home. The Soviet Union later claimed he had died in prison in 1947; the truth has never been fully established.

    This is where the walk ends, at the back of the synagogue where it began, above a garden that holds graves of the ghetto winter. Look at the leaves move when the wind catches them. When the ghetto was liberated, tens of thousands walked out alive, and every one of the rescuers you met today was a single person who chose to act. Stay as long as you like... and when you leave, Erzsébetváros is waiting outside, as alive as ever.