Szegő Dóra - Szegő György: Synagogues - Our Budapest (Budapest, 2004)

The Öntőház utca Synagogue

to penitence on the feast of the Jewish New Year.) On the four corners of the bimah, standing on a high rosetted-edged pedestal, rose Empire-style obelisks topped with an eagle spreading its wings, perched on a sphere. Contemporary photographs show carved garlands girdling the obelisks and forming a virtual canopy with the multi-tiered chandelier above the bimah.

In the middle of the Eastern wall stood the wooden Ark, flanked on each side by a wooden column painted greyish-white resting on a high pedestal. Later the wall-section by the Ark was decorated with stucco ornamentation—their pattern symbolically representing the burning bush and the stone tablets of Moses—were also added. (The arches topping the tablets of the law and shaping vaulted gates traditionally represent heaven, while the angular forms refer to the mundane world. This symbolism is condensed in the tablet-form suggesting how the ''Godly" and the "human" meet as Moses takes the tablets with the Ten Commandments from Mount Sinai.)

The building was reconstructed to Gyula Ullmann's Art Nouveau plans in 1900. The flower-shaped clock on the tympanum originally set, in the style of Neo-Classicist ornamentation, between two bay-branches was surrounded with the Secessionist decoration and is still extant. The plain windows were also replaced with stained-glass ones, and a small Jewish museum, accessible from the street at the time, was installed in the North wing.

The old houses with the Jewish slaughterhouse and the town hall among them that stood around the synagogue and preserved something of the original atmosphere of the place until as late as the second half of the 20th century were demolished during the exterior reconstruction of the synagogue in the late 1970s. The church was first meant to be used as a concert hall by the municipality. Eventually, it was converted into the storehouse of a textile museum at the expense of destroying most of its valuable interior, then was appropriated by Hungarian Television, which turned the building into its Studio 5.

The Öntőház utca Synagogue

This Jewish prayer-house was built around 1790 on the site where a mediaeval cannon-casting workshop, the Turkish Top Khaneh, had stood before being reconstructed in Biedermeier style around a cast-iron frame. The building raised in 1865 in the Moorish style was designed by Ignác Knabe. From then on, the Neologue synagogue at 5 Öntőház utca remained the main church of the Buda Jews for decades. Towering above the one- and two-floor houses of the neighbourhood, the building at the foot of Castle Hill overlooked the Danube.

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