The Great Synagogue

Tuesday morning began in the Maverick Lodge hotel's kitchen area, with continental breakfast. Following breakfast, we walked up the street to the Dohány Street Synagogue. The Synagogue is the largest in Europe and the second largest in the world; second to Temple Emanu-El in NYC.  However, the capacity for this one is greater than in NYC. The English speaking tour was informative - we learned that pre-WW2, 5% of Hungary's total population was Jewish, with 23% of the population in Budapest. There were business owners/shop keepers, doctors, scientists and they ere well integrated into the culture. By May 1944, and even as Soviet troops approached, hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews were rounded up and taken to Auschwitz, where 1 in 3 people killed was a Hungarian Jew. Today, approximately 0.5% of Hungary's population is Jewish.
After our lesson, we wandered through the synagogue, which has many Christian/Catholic features, including an organ (How do they play the organ at services, you ask?  They hire a gentile to play), two pulpits and a general design that is more Christian. The reason, you wonder? The two architects commissioned to the project were both Catholics.

After we wandered around the interior of the synagogue, we re-gathered in the courtyard where a Jewish Cemetery acts as a reminder to everyone passing through about the atrocities of WW2. In the courtyard in back, a sculpture has been erected to remember the victims of the war. The design is a  metal weeping willow - symbolic of the general sentiments of the families of the victims. It is also designed as an inverted menorah. On each leaf was the name of a martyr. 

Also in the courtyard is the Holocaust Memorial by Imre Varga. It stands above the Raoul Wallenberg memorial, who was a Swedish diplomat who saved many Jews during WW2.