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The Dohany Street Synagogue

The synagogue on the Dohany street of Pest is not only the most impressive one in the country, but it’s the largest synagogue of Europe, the second largest one in the world. (The largest Jewish house of worship in the world is the Temple Emanu-El in New York). The tours in the Jewish district of Budapest all have their departure point at the Dohany synagogue. This recently restored, magnificent, twin-towered building celebrated 150 years of existence in 2009. Let it take your breath away with its beautiful interior, see why it is among the top ten sights of Budapest.

The second largest synagogue of the world located in downtown Budapest had to be constructed on an asymmetric lot in order to place the Ark looking East. In a way it is hidden from our eyes if we arrive to the 7th district from Muzeum korut (where the National Museum is), however the talent of its designers is shown by the impressiveness of the building even if facing a small square and not the boulevard. Frigyes Feszl and Ludwig Fďż˝rster created their masterpiece in the middle of a metropolis using the Oriental-Byzantine (Moorish) style influenced by Moslem architecture.

The consecration of the synagogue was a major event on September 6, 1859. It can hold 3000 seated and approximately 2000 standing people. Major events took and take place here, like the celebrations part of the 1000th anniversary of the Hungarian Conquest in May 1896, memorial services for important Hungarian personalities in the 19th century, liturgical, organ or Klezmer concerts nowadays. The Dohany Synagogue remained the most important religious centre of the Neolog Jews in Hungary to this day.

Kazinczy Street Synagogue

Kazinczy Street Synagogue is an Art Nouveau orthodox synagogue built between 1912 and 1913 Budapest VII. district, 29-31 Kazinczy Street number. It is one of the most characteristic works of Hungarian synagogue architecture before the First World War. The gigantic building that dominates the narrow Kazinczy Street was completed between 1912 and 1913, based on the plans of Sándor Löffler and Béla Löffler. The interior is decorated with decorative stonework that supports glass windows painted by Miksa Róth. The Torah reading platform stands in the middle of the space.

At the end of the 19th century, the Jewish community of Pest broke into three branches – Neolog, status quo ante and Orthodox. The Kazinczy Street Synagogue was built for the latter – the most tradition-bound, strict Jewish community. The community building complex includes the synagogue, a house of worship, headquarters, a kindergarten, a Talmud school, a butcher and bath (mikveh). The latter was renovated in 2004, under the guidance of a Hasidic plumber from New York, who worked here from Sundays to Thursdays, then got on a plane and went home to spend the Sabbath with his family. The water of the well that supplies the bath’s was purified with 1000 liters of red wine. The smaller, modern house of worship next to the synagogue was built by the plans of religious community engineer Sándor Bokor.

Image attribution:
Emmanuel Dyan, CC BY 2.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

Hungarian Jewish Museum and Archives

The Hungarian Jewish Museum is located in the heart of Budapest, in the Historical Jewish quarter, within the building complex of the Dohany Street Synagogue that was built in 1859. The idea of an independent Jewish Museum arose in 1909, when our Museum was founded. The first home of the collection made up of approximately 1,500 artefacts was an apartment downtown Budapest. The Jewish Museum found its final home in 1932 at the building designed by Laszlo Vago and Ferenc Farago, which was constructed next to the Dohany street synagogue in a matching architectural style.

In 1942 two employees of the Hungarian National Museum hid the valuable artefacts of the Jewish Museum in the cellar. Thanks to their bravery, the entire rich collection exists today. The permanent exhibition was rearranged in 2017, displaying the Jewish festivals and lifecycle. Our Milev-App The Milev-app can be downloaded from Google Play and the App Store.

Holocaust Memorial Center

The Holocaust Memorial Center is a national institution established by the Government in 1999. In 2002, it decided to construct the building of the Center in Páva Street, outside of the traditional Jewish quarter, further emphasizing its national character. The Holocaust Memorial Center is a museum and an exhibition hall at the same time, offering daily to its visitors an attractive permanent, and frequently changing periodic exhibitions. The equipment and the space in the modern building are shaped to allow displaying classical retrospectives, as well as innovative, interactive exhibitions.

The permanent presentation is placed in the basement of the Memorial Center, while the periodic exhibitions use the space of the refurbished synagogue, particularly its gallery, and the inner court of the Center. The accuracy and authenticity of the exhibitions is monitored by outstanding Hungarian and foreign historians, artists and experts. The Holocaust Memorial Center is one of the few institutions in the world, established by the state that focuses entirely on Holocaust research and education.

Shoes on the Danube Bank

Sculptors Gyula Pauer and Can Togay have created a moving memorial to these Holocaust atrocities that sits in front of the magnificent Parliament building on the edge of the river. What visitors will see are 60 pairs of rusted period shoes cast out of iron. Different sizes and styles reflect how nobody was spared from the brutality of the Arrow Cross militia (the shoes depict children, women, businessmen, sportsmen etc.).

The memorial was designed to honour the Jews who were massacred by Fascist Hungarian militia belonging to the Arrow Cross Party in Budapest during the Second World War. They were ordered to take off their shoes (shoes were valuable and could be stolen and resold by the militia after the massacre), and were shot at the edge of the water so that their bodies fell into the river and were carried away. The memorial represents their shoes left behind on the bank. Behind the sculpture lies a 40 meter long, 70 cm high stone bench where at three points are cast iron signs, with the following text in Hungarian, English, and Hebrew: “To the memory of the victims shot into the Danube by Arrow Cross militiamen in 1944–45. Erected 16 April 2005.”

Image attribution:
Dennis JARVIS, CC BY-SA 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
Marek Mróz, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

Jewish Museum of Berlin

The Jewish Museum Berlin is one of the outstanding institutions on the European museum landscape. Its new core exhibition that opened in 2020, its temporary exhibitions, collections, events program and the W. Michael Blumenthal Academy, as well as its digital and educational offerings make the museum is a vibrant place for dialog and reflection on Jewish past and present in Germany. ANOHA, the JMB Children’s World, tells the story of Noah’s Ark as a fun experience for children. Our exhibitions, events, and diverse program address a broad audience from Germany and around the world. Our collections grow continually, thanks also to many donors from Germany and abroad.

A special focus is educational work – the extensive education program, the research opportunities in the library and archive, and the program of events are aimed at children, young people, and adults. In addition to guided tours and workshops, there are lectures and conferences, concerts and readings, and an annual cultural summer program. Our digital programs are also very diverse, including the museum’s website, the JMB app, various online features on Jewish topics, online publications, online collections, and a media library.

The New Synagogue of Berlin

The New Synagogue on Oranienburger Straße in Berlin is a mid-19th century synagogue built as the main place of worship for Berlin’s Jewish community, succeeding the Old Synagogue which the community outgrew. Because of its eastern Moorish style and resemblance to the Alhambra, the New Synagogue is an important architectural monument in Germany.

The building was designed by Eduard Knoblauch. Following Knoblauch’s death in 1865, Friedrich August Stüler took responsibility for the majority of its construction as well as for its interior arrangement and design. It was inaugurated in the presence of Count Otto von Bismarck, then Minister President of Prussia, in 1866. One of the few synagogues to survive Kristallnacht, it was badly damaged prior to and during World War II and subsequently much was demolished; the present building on the site is a reconstruction of the ruined street frontage with its entrance, dome and towers, and only a few rooms behind. It is truncated before the point where the main hall of the synagogue began.

The New Synagogue was built to serve the growing Jewish population in Berlin, in particular, immigrants from the East. It was the largest synagogue in Germany at the time, seating 3,000 people. The building housed public concerts, including a violin concert with Albert Einstein in 1930. With an organ and a choir, the religious services reflected the liberal developments in the Jewish community of the time.

During the November Pogrom (9 November 1938), colloquially euphemised as “Kristallnacht”, a Nazi mob broke into the Neue Synagoge, desecrated the Torah scrolls, smashed the furniture, piled up such contents as would burn in the synagogue interior, and set fire to them. Lieutenant Otto Bellgardt, the police officer of the local police precinct on duty that night, arrived on the scene in the early morning of 10 November and ordered the arsonists to disperse. He said the building was a protected historical landmark and drew his pistol, declaring that he would uphold the law requiring its protection. This allowed the fire brigade to enter and extinguish the fire before it could spread to the fabric of the building, and the synagogue was saved from destruction.

Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe

The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe (Denkmal für die ermordeten Juden Europas)is located on Cora-Berliner-Straße. Designed by Peter Eisenman, it features 2,711 concrete slabs arranged in a grid-like formation. Each slab is several meters long and 3 feet wide. Adjacent to the memorial is an information center, which contains a timeline of the Final Solution, as well as the names of millions of victims of the holocaust. There’s also a visitors center, which displays many important moments and memories from the Holocaust. The memorial was opened in May 2005.

The debates over whether to have such a memorial and what form it should take extend back to the late 1980s, when a small group of private German citizens, led by television journalist Lea Rosh and historian Eberhard Jäckel, first began pressing for Germany to honor the six million Jews murdered in the Holocaust. Rosh soon emerged as the driving force behind the memorial. In 1989, she founded a group to support its construction and to collect donations. With growing support, the Bundestag (German federal parliament) passed a resolution in favour of the project. On 25 June 1999, the Bundestag decided to build the memorial designed by Peter Eisenman. A federal foundation (Foundation for the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe) was consequently founded to run it.

Three years after the official opening of the memorial, half of the blocks made from compacting concrete started to crack. While some interpret this defect as an intentional symbolization of the immortality and durability of the Jewish community, the memorials’ foundation deny this. Some analyze the lack of individual names on the monument as an illustration of the unimaginable number of murdered Jews in the Holocaust. In this way, the memorial illustrates that the number of Jewish individuals murdered in the Holocaust was so colossal that is impossible to physically visualize

Stolpersteine (the “Stumbling Stone”)

The Stolpersteine (stumbling stone) is an art project inspired by Gunter Demnig. The concept is to install commemorative brass plaques in the pavement in front of the homes of known holocaust victims. The plaque records who lived at the address and that they were a victim of the Nazi regime. The very first stolperstein was set on 16 December 1992 in front of the Cologne City Hall. Currently, there are tens of thousands of “Stolpersteines” across Europe. In Berlin, there are many such stones, including a famous one located at Togostraße 25O, which is open daily for public viewing.

Image attribution:
Gmbo 2013, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons
Geolina163, CC BY-SA 4.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

The Weissensee Cemetery

The Weißensee Cemetery is a Jewish cemetery located in the neighborhood of Weißensee in Berlin, Germany. It is the second largest Jewish cemetery in Europe covering approximately 100 acres and contains approximately 115,000 graves.

Directly in front of the entrance is a Holocaust memorial, a commemorative stone, surrounded by further stones, each with the names of concentration camps. Next to this, there is a memorial to Jews who lost their lives during World War I (which was dedicated in 1927) and also a commemorative plaque to those who fought Nazism.

The plot of land was bought by the Jewish community of Berlin, comprising – besides congregants of orthodox and reform affiliation – mostly observants of mainstream Judaism (in today’s term described at best as conservative Judaism). The old Jewish cemetery in Große Hamburger Straße, opened 1672, had reached its full capacity in 1827. The second cemetery in Schönhauser Allee, opened in the same year, reached its capacity in the 1880s, offering only few remaining gravesites in family ensembles mostly reserved for widows and widowers next to their earlier deceased spouses. Weißensee Cemetery was designed by renowned German architect Hugo Licht in the Italian Neorenaissance style. It was inaugurated in 1880. The surrounding walls and main building (where the archives are kept and the cemetery is administered) were constructed with a distinctive yellow brick. A second building (built in 1910) was destroyed during World War II.

The grave plots are arranged into 120 different sections, each with its own geometric shape. The lavish way in which the more well-to-do individuals and families interred here chose to fashion their mausoleums using the latest art nouveau designs is immediately noticeable. The periphery of the cemetery is predominantly reserved for the upper and middle classes, while the center is occupied by the less well off, in areas which are harder to reach and often overgrown by foliage.

With the rise of Nazism the existence of the cemetery was at risk (many Jewish cemeteries in Europe were destroyed) but the site survived relatively unscathed. Some 4000 graves are estimated to have been damaged by Allied bombing. After World War II, Jews from all parts of Berlin continued to use the cemetery up until 1955. Between 1955 and German reunification in 1990, only the small Jewish community in East Berlin used it.

During the four decades of the German Democratic Republic, the cemetery was relatively neglected because most of Berlin’s Jewish community had been murdered during, or had fled from, the Holocaust. Many of the graves were left unattended and became overgrown with weeds. In the 1970s, plans to build an expressway over part of the cemetery were considered, linking Michelangelostraße to the newly constructed Hansastraße. This proposal was dropped due to strong objections from the remaining Jewish community.

It has been estimated by cemetery officials that the cost of fully repairing the damage caused by years of neglect would amount to 40 million euros. On the occasion of the cemetery’s 125th anniversary, appeals were made to the Berlin government to increase funding, so that a bid can be made to add the site to the UNESCO world heritage list. The bid was supported by Berlin’s former mayor Klaus Wowereit.

Image Attribution:
Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-1988-0911-020 / Schindler, Karl-Heinz / CC-BY-SA 3.0, CC BY-SA 3.0 DE , via Wikimedia Commons;
Neuköllner, CC BY-SA 4.0 , via Wikimedia Commons;
OTFW, Berlin, CC BY-SA 3.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

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