The Dohany Street Synagogue in Budapest is massive and gorgeous and frankly looks like a Catholic church. This is not the synagogue of my childhood which was housed in an elementary school. When I think of synagogue I do not think of gilded embellishments, stained glass and intricate wood carvings but that's what this place is all about. It's a sight to behold.
But visiting this amazing place is bittersweet. You cannot visit without getting a pit in your stomach. The Nazis killed 600,000 Hungarian Jews. That's 10% of the total killed during the Holocaust, which I find amazing since this is such a small country. The Hungarian demographic, particularly regarding Jews became completely different once the Nazis took over Hungary in March of 1944.
It was the end of the war by the time the Nazis got here and they ramped things up fast. In no time all the Budapest Jews were locked behind the walls of a ghetto. The Nazis used the gorgeous synagogue as a horse stable. The courtyard of the synagogue grounds is a Jewish cemetery where the Jews were forced to bury their dead.
They quickly started transporting Jews by the hundreds of the thousands to Auschwitz and disposing of them...no swanky work camps for these Jews. The Hungarian Nazi party called the Arrow Cross helped out by ridding the country of tens of thousands of Jews with a death march to Austria. They would also hunt them down throughout the city, shoot them and throw them in the river. Nice huh. Sorry to be so blunt, but how else should people talk about this? It is brutal and all I can think about is how scary it must have been for those people. It's like a horror movie.
But there are monuments to this atrocity all over the city. The garden behind the temple has this beautiful metal tree with tags memorializing thousands of Jewish names.
And this instillation represents those that perished in the Danube.
Thanks for sharing this...So tragic.
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