Zsinagoga---The Great Synagogue

Budapest is home to the 2nd largest Synagogue in the world (behind New York City). I decided that it might be cool to check it out. I had never been inside a Synagogue before, and well, I didn't really know what to expect at all....so off I went. It was beautiful inside. It did look a lot like a a Christian church, with a couple of things that gave away it's synagogue-y-ness.

Before the Holocaust, 25% of the population of Budapest were Jewish, however, just two months after the Natzi invasion of Hungary, Jewish people were sent to Auschwitz, many of these people worshiped at this very synagogue. 600 000 Hungarian Jews were killed. After the war this synagogue lad vacant for 40 years. However, after the fall of communism, a renewed interest, and a lot of 'American Jewish donations ' (as the tour guide explained) completely restored the church to its original form. The Synagogue wasn't completely destroyed because the Natzi's used it for their own purposes. They attached antenna's to the top of the two towers, and stored horses in the nave.....

As the guided tour of the Synagogue was about 1 buck more than just paying to enter, I decided to take the tour. It was in English, and our tour guide was really cool. Her late father was recently awarded a special distinction for hiding Jews in the Budapest Ghetto during the Second World War. He was Catholic (she clarified that her mother was Jewish), and so from what I understood, he would have had more mobility and freedom (loosely defined here). Anyway, I was the only person in the group who had never been inside a Synagogue before, but it was okay as she went through the history of the building, and key historical facts directly related to this Synagogue. I was beside an Israeli women and her Rabbi husband on my left, and a Romanian man and his wife (who translated from English to Romanian). It was pretty fascinating.

The Synagogue was built in 1859 and is loosley designed based on the biblical descriptions of the Temple pf Solomon in Jerusalem. As this is the first time I've ever been to a Synagogue, I can't really speak to how this one looks so much more like a church than others, but I was assured that it did by several reliable sources. :)
One of the reasons why this synagogue does have many similarities with Christian churches is because it was supposed to be in recongition of the efforts for integration and assimilation of the Jews who moved and settled in Pest throughout the late 18th and 19th centuries. It is located in the old Jewish Quarter of Budapest (which was also the Ghetto that Jews were forced to live in during WWI).

The synagogue can hold something like 3000 people in one service. The men sit on the ground level, and the women and children sit on the 2nd and 3rd floors (on High Holy Days), but I am not sure if they sit separately on a regular basis. According to the tour guide, the seats in the upper galleries are designed in such a way that you can't actually see who is sitting on the ground floor (or who is across in the other galleries for that matter). She said that the reason why it's like it is because the purpose of prayer, is to prey, and well you can't do that properly if you are checking out who is here (and who isn't). I really liked this tour guide :). (the women in the green sweater was the tour guide).

Behind that red cloth that looks like an 'alter' (sorry I didn't catch the proper term for it)...there are 25 scared Torahs (For safe keeping, they were actually buried in a cemetery by Catholic priests during the war). The chairs that are in that area are reserved for VIP only (the tour guides words, not mine)You can also see the Organ (this is not an orthodox synagogue), which was played by Franz Liszt during the inauguration of the synagogue!

After the tour of the synagogue (with plenty more details :)), we were taken outside to a courtyard where there was a cemetary. Here is where the Jews buried those who died in the Budapest ghetto during the Holocaust. There are some headstones here, but there are actually thousands of people buried here. In the early 1990s (during the renovations), the public was allowed to come an etch the names of any family members that they new were buried here. The Jews were sealed into a ghetto (by large stone walls they had to build themselves) behind the Synagogue during the occupation, and had nothing, many perished.

The passage way leds to the Tree of Life, a memorial designed by Imre Varga. It is supposed to be an upsidedown mennorah, with 4 000 leaves, all etched with the name of a victim in the Holocaust. It was really intricate, and the garden itself was very quiet and peaceful.In the garden there are also other monuments to commorate not sure Jews who perished, but also non-Jews who saved Jews during the war. The most famous person (at least in Hungary), was the Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg who, during the war, saved something like 35 000 Jews from Hungary by issuing them 'travel passes', or 'Wallenberg Passports' and set up houses for the safe passage of Jews out of Hungary. they were deemed 'safe' as Wallenberg flew the flags of Sweden and other neutral countries in front of these houses. He also follow the death marches (where Jews were made to walk hundreds of miles to camps), as well as the trains to Auswitz, distributing food and clothes and even, pulling people off the trains. He was quite a man. Sadly, he was arrested by Soviet troops, and out of confusion was sent to a gulag, where they think he died. There is a grave in this garden (along with other people's names close by) as a memento to him. One of the names is the name of the father of the tour guide. After the 'tour' the tour guide went off course and took us to the place where the they found parts of the original Ghetto wall. They found it in a construction site......and rebuilt part of it. To give you an idea of how much history is literally in people's backyards, to get to the actual wall (and plaque), you have to go through the atrium of a private apartment building to basically the back of the house.

It's really neat that the history of this region old, yet also so new, so raw, and so much woven into the daily lives of people (whether they realize or not).