Budapest shul offers glimpse into the past

It's Friday, time yet again for another Posting of Interesting Jewish Stories & Facts (IJS&F). Today we travel to Budapest and visit one of the largest and most beautiful synagogues in the world.

The Dohany Street Synagogue, one of the top tourist attractions in Budapest, is minutes away from the heart of the city, a comfortable walk from the Danube, Chain Bridge and other popular landmarks across the inner city of Pesh.

Remarkably, the shul isn’t showing her age, even as the Jewish community here observes the sesquicentennial of this exquisite facility. It’s been over a decade since the building received a multi-million dollar face lift and was restored to its original glory after near destruction during World War II and years of neglect by the communists.

Hidden from view by shops and apartments, the shul is slowly revealed, bits of its exotic features and intricate masonry coming into view once you make your way into the Jewish quarter.

At first glance the building is a euphonic blend of towers and stained glass, arches and onion-shaped domes, all wrapped together neatly in a Byzantine-Moorish style. Design details — an eclectic blend of whirls and swirls and painted brick — add richness and depth to the structure.

The other-worldly, decidedly Middle-Eastern feel of the place is balanced and enhanced with religious iconography, including Jewish stars and a large mosaic of a menorah spilling across a gathering spot in front of the synagogue. For those still uncertain what they have stumbled upon, the entrance is topped with a phrase in Hebrew taken from the book of Exodus: “And let them make Me a sanctuary so I may dwell among them.”

The richly-ornamented interior borders on the surreal, an over-the-top blend of colors, shapes and architectural styles. The expansive space — it’s one of the largest synagogues in the world and can hold nearly 3,000 people — has a warm, golden glow about it, filled with light that’s filtered through yellow-tinted, stained-glass windows.

Rows of wooden pews, well-worn with age and use, rest heavily on a simple floor. An aisle of mosaic tiles in an intricate star-like pattern runs the length of the shul, about half the size of a football field, from a set of stained-glass doors at the entrance to the impressive, ornately-decorated bimah.

A pair of massive chandeliers comprised of a series of glass globes dangle high overhead while dozens of other fixtures, all mimicking the same look, hang from the ceiling, the upper railing of a second-floor balcony and atop the third-floor balcony’s balustrade. While the entire space is magnificent, the bimah — the artistic and spiritual focus of the synagogue — demands attention. It’s set off by an ornate, intricately-designed gate, two towering menorahs and an arch, soaring three stories high.

A dome of heroic proportion, covered in abstract frescoes, hovers above the ark, mirroring the shape of the golden crown that tops the Aron Kodesh. The ark is immense, the size of a small house with its own arches and columns, adorned with architectural detail in gold relief. It holds sefer torahs, many taken from synagogues across Eastern Europe destroyed during the Holocaust.

The Dohany Street Synagogue almost suffered the same fate as those other houses of prayer. What exists here today is all the more remarkable given the shul’s history, especially over the last seven decades.

Signs of a Jewish presence in the region first appeared nearly 1,000 years ago when Roman emperors still ruled the area. For the next eight centuries, Jews here, as across the rest of Europe, lived through periods of persecution, benign neglect and, occasionally, enlightened acceptance.

In the middle of the 19th Century, during the reign of Emperor Franz Joseph, Jews were not allowed to live in the city of Pest — it, and the neighboring communities of Buda and Obuda, would consolidate in 1873 as one city, Budapest. Despite the housing ban, anti-Semitic outbreaks quieted and, interestingly, talk of full emancipation was in the air.

It was during this period, when all seemed possible, that the Jewish community of Pest decided to build a new synagogue in the heart of their community on, Dohany Street. They hired a Viennese architect, Ludwig Foerster, and made it clear they wanted something grand — beautiful, large, exotic and, perhaps, a bit like their neighbor’s churches. Foerster got the message.

He created a Jewish basilica — a long-aisled hall ending in a dome-covered aspe, featuring ornamental frescoes, arched windows and stained-glass doors and windows. He even managed to include a 5,000-tubed organ. Foerster then filled the cavernous space with ritualistic bits of judaica — the ark, menorahs, eternal light and stars.

The Jewish community flourished and the Dohany Street Synagogue became an integral and impressive part of the city for decades. Anti-Semitism, unfortunately, also remained part of Budapest and the region. But it wasn’t until the rise of National Socialism in Germany in the 1930s, that Jews were openly persecuted once again and the Dohany Street shul entered its darkest hours.

As the world moved toward war, Hungary aligned itself with Germany and Italy. In the late ’30s and early ’40s, the country enacted a series of anti-Jewish laws that set limits on the jobs Jews could hold, schools they could attend, where they could live and who they could marry. Despite such draconian measures, Jews in Hungary remained relatively free. All that would soon change.

Over a period of eight weeks in the spring of 1944, Jews across the region were rounded up and forced into ghettos — one of the largest centered around Dohany Street in Budapest. Only weeks later the first transports began. Even as Soviet troops neared the Hungarian border and freedom loomed precariously on the horizon, the trains continued to roll. By mid-summer, over half the Jews in Hungary — about 500,000 men, women and children — had been deported. Most were murdered in the gas chambers of Auschwitz, the Nazi death camp in southern Poland.

It was during this period that the Dohany shul became part of a Nazi military district, then an internment camp, then a deportation center. For a time, Adolph Eichman planned the “Final Solution” from an office in the synagogue. Nearby, nearly 100,000 Jews in the city continued to cling to life. It was a daily struggle and thousands died of disease, starvation and abuse. By the war’s end less than a third of the Jews of Hungary, about 255,000 people, remained alive.

The Jewish community briefly rallied following the war, but once the communists took hold of the country in 1949 the number of Jews decreased sharply. The area around Dohany Street remained a center of Jewish life in the country, but the synagogue was, quite literally, only a shell of its former self. Its roof was open in spots, windows shattered and bordered up, grounds filled with debris. Decades of neglect followed.

In the late 1960s there were about 85,000 Jews in Hungary, a decade later only about 60,000, most living in Budapest. And then the world changed.

In 1989, across Central and Eastern Europe, communist states began to topple. It all began in Poland, followed quickly by Hungary, the first Warsaw Pact country to break free of Soviet domination. Only a year later, much of the region was toying with democracy and capitalism, opening its borders to investors and tourists.

Money poured in and among the first projects to be planned and funded by sources outside the country was the restoration of the Dohany Street Synagogue. A number of philanthropic organizations, mostly Jewish and mostly American, provided cash to repair and restore the shul. The three-year project was finished in 1996.

The Jewish community also made a comeback. There are now over 100,000 Jews in the region, enough to support a day school, university, community center and 20 synagogues. The Dohany Street shul attracts thousands of tourists each year and once again finds itself at the spiritual heart of the Jewish quarter. And why not? Its founders planned a shul for the ages and today it remains as beautiful and magnificent as ever.

Shoes poignant reminder of Holocaust victims

It's Friday, time again for another posting of Interesting Jewish Stories & Facts (IJS&F). This week, let's remain in Budapest and visit a poignant memorial next to the Danube.

There's a bit of whimsy at play with this powerful memorial, a row of shoes along the Danube on the Pest side of the city.

The shoes can be found in the shadow of Hungary's impressive Parliament Building and, at first glance, seem a trifle, a bit of public art to amuse tourists and others on a stroll along the river's promenade. But the memorial's artist, award-winning sculptor Gyula Pauler, captures a dark moment in Hungary's history and makes a powerful statement with his simple design.

The story he builds around is heartbreaking. Through much of World War II, Jews in Hungary managed to hunker down and escape the wrath of the Nazi war machine. Eastern Europe was turned into a massive concentration camp and Jews from across the continent were being deported to death camps in Poland, Austria, Germany and other countries that had nurtured anti-Semitism for decades.

Inexplicably, the Jews of Hungary seemed safe. Life was tough, but not an automatic death sentence for them. In the fall of 1944, Russian troops had managed to battle their way into Hungary and peace seemed to be an idea that rested uneasily on the horizon. Sadly, in those closing days of the war, tens of thousands of Jews in the region were shipped off to the East -- Auschwitz, Dachau, Treblinka.

In Budapest, members of the Arrow Cross Party, the Nazis of Hungary, rounded up many of the remaining Jews and marched them to the Danube. They stripped them of their clothes and had them step out of their shoes on the embankment, where the men, women and children were shot and tossed into the river.

Sixty pairs of shoes, carefully sculpted by Pauler and arranged only feet from the Danube, dot the site where the Jews were murdered, and the melancholy memorial now serves as a silent prayer for the dead.

Weeping Willow honors those lost in Hungary

It's Friday and time again for another posting of Interesting Jewish Stories & Facts. Today we visit the lovely city of Budapest and a unique memorial in the Jewish quarter of the city.

Behind the imposing Dohany Street Synagogue in Budapest, in a park named for Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat who saved thousands of Jews during World War II, is an imaginative, poignant memorial to the 600,000 Hungarian Jews who didn't escape the Holocaust.

The "Silver Weeping Willow," designed by the Hungarian artist Imre Varga, is an eye-catching maze of metal, slivers of silver that reach for the sky, then bend and fall to earth.

Thousands of metal leaves, many engraved with the names of the murdered, cling to the branches of the sculpture, swaying gently with the wind, glittering in the afternoon sun. Above it all, an inscription in Hebrew raises the mournful question, "Whose agony is greater than mine?"

On the day I visited the memorial, part of a congregational trip through Eastern Europe with friends from the Land of Cotton, only a few tourists and locals were scattered about. I couldn't help but wonder how fleeting and capricious life can be at times, that in fact my life might be dramatically different if one man many decades earlier had not, along with his family, left his home in Hungary to find a better life in America.

Joseph Klein, known as Joe or Joey to most of his friends and family, was born and spent his early years in a small village outside of Budapest, but came of age in New York. Of course he would never have met and married his wife Roz if he had remained in Hungary, and their two daughters -- the lovely Miss Wendy and my sister-in-law Ann -- would not exist.

That little wrinkle in reality would have continued to ripple across time and today there would be no Cheryl, Arlene or Lauren -- our daughters. Their husbands would have never known the joy of meeting and marrying their beshert and the following generation would be lost as well.

The fact that Joe and his family skedaddled when they did meant they would escape the Holocaust and his descendants would come into being. But what about the hundreds, the thousands, the millions who remained part of Eastern Europe? The tragedy of the Six Million murdered by the Nazis is not just their deaths but the future generations that were lost.

So I weep at the Weeping Willow memorial not only for those lost, but for those never allowed to experience this thing we call life -- the joy and sorrow, exhilaration and pain that comes with living. There loss is our loss, just one additional tragedy of the Holocaust and just one more reason to "never forget".

Honoring the dead: The Weeping Willow Memorial (photo above), is in a small park behind the Dohany Shul in Budapest, a unique remembrance of the thousands of Hungarian Jews lost in the Holocaust.