Dohany Street Synagogue

Dohany Street Synagogue

Until I rounded the corner of the block where I was staying to see Europe's largest synagogue, I hadn't realized how close I was staying to the old Jewish quarter and historical ghetto during WWII.  Imagine my surprise, as this place will be essential to the story I'm writing.

It's a sad history--the story of the Jewish people in Hungary, as elsewhere in Europe. Nearly 600,000 people perished in the Holocaust. In March 1944, Hitler took over Hungary, and in two short months, had deported Jews from all over the country to Auschwitz.  The Nazis had the full cooperation of the Arrow Cross party in Hungary. But the injustices against the Jews had started even before Hitler's invasion.  Hungary passed the first Anti-Jewish laws in 1920, which limited the number of Jews that could attend Hungarian universities to six percent. On May 29, 1938, a law: restricted the number of Jews in each commercial enterprise, in the press, among physicians, engineers and lawyers to twenty percent. On May 5, 1939,a law defined Jews racially: people with 2, 3 or 4 Jewish-born grandparents were declared Jewish. They were forbidden from taking a job in government at any level;from being editors at newspapers, and  their numbers were restricted to six per cent among theater and movie actors, physicians, lawyers and engineers. Private companies were forbidden to employ more than 12 percent Jews. When Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June, 1941, and Hungary allied with Germany, Hungary formed the labor service system, and conscripted 150,000 Jewish men into labor service.  These men were ill-equipped for this service; they weren't given boots or clothing or weapons to defend themselves. The following month, in July 1941, the Hungarian government deported 40,000 Jews who had questionable citizenship. The "Third Jewish Law" was passed on August 8, 1941, and that prohibited intermarriage and penalized sexual intercourse between Jews and non-Jews. The same month, 16,000 foreign Jews who had fled to Hungary from neighboring nations were taken to Kamenetz-Podolsk in the Ukraine and machine-gunned together with 7,000 local Jews.

The Great Synagogue, Tree of Life and Memorial Garden, and the Jewish Museum bear witness to the tragic events and the hundreds of thousands of people lost. The small cemetery on the grounds was used to bury the dead who perished in the sealed ghetto in Budapest, an aberration of the sacrosanct rules of Judaism to separate blood (death) from the sacred grounds of the temple. The Hungarian guide explained to us in English that it was one of the many ways the Nazis shamed the Jews.  Another was to use the pages of the sacred Torah into drum heads.  Or to take the men's prayer shawls and make them into women's dresses.  In the Jewish Museum (Zsido Muzeum), a dark room depicts the horrors of the 40s, the propaganda about the Jews, the men in the labor service, the deportations, countless numbers of people in the concentration camps, and the dead that lined the streets in the Budapest ghetto. In the middle of this are the pictures and names of people--Jews and non-Jews--who attempted to save as many Jews as they could.   Most famous among them was Raoul Wallenberg, a diplomat from Sweden, who gave Swedish passports and admitted thousands of Jews to designated "safe houses".  A memorial to him and others lies in the Memorial Garden.  The Tree of Life, sculpted by Imre Varga, is a weeping willow and a contorted upside-down menorah, one of the symbols of the Jewish faith. Etched on the metal leaves are the names of Holocaust victims.

Tree of Life, weeping with the name of Holocaust victims

Much of Budapest was destroyed in WWII, when the Soviets advanced into the city, and from the Nazis' defense. But there is still remnants that stand, and in the old Jewish quarter, there are many four-, five- and six-storey Art Nouveau street-facing facades, if pock-marked with bullet holes and other damage suffered during the awful siege of Budapest nearly seventy ago.