Szegő Dóra - Szegő György: Synagogues - Our Budapest (Budapest, 2004)
The Great Synagogue in Dohány utca
as well as the inclusion of a chorus and an organ. The representatives of the community promised a new temple to the traditionalists who rejected the Dohány utca synagogue, and undertook to finance the maintenance of an Orthodox prayer-house until its completion.) Accommodating almost three thousand people, the new temple was envisaged to be the largest synagogue of Europe and, admitting 3,100 sitting and 1,000 standing believers, it has remained the most capacious Jewish temple in use to this day. The intention to embrace reform implied willingness to welcome the new architectural style. This did not occur without some setbacks, however. But the Dohány utca synagogue did come to represent innovation in the history of Hungary's synagogues, emblematic of a new Jewish idea of a temple, architecturally and otherwise. Until the ascendancy of Neologue Judaism, the synagogue was traditionally seen as no more than a place of assembly, an unfit substitute for the Sanctuary of Jerusalem. In Jewish tradition, living in diaspora means a condition of temporary exile, in which expecting the arrival of the Messiah is the very focus of religious life. The coming of the Redeemer will bring with it the reconstruction of the Temple of Jerusalem; then, and only then, can the synagogue assume its full functions as a real temple. In the Neologue faith, on the other hand, waiting for the Messiah lost its pivotal role and thus the synagogue was invested with a higher significance. The promise of a sanctuary to be built with the arrival of the Messiah was reinterpreted as something to be fulfilled in a sacred dimension of time. The Jewish temple, existing in the present, was now imbued with architectural and spiritual values and accepted as the community's legitimate possession. A fundamentally new type of building was thus born, and the architects put in charge of creating it had to find the formal idiom and spatial layout best suited to the task. The conception gained common currency that as the Jews had Oriental roots, Oriental elements can best give architectural expression to a Jewish idea of the temple. Also, the Romanticism of the period, which contrasted sharply with the international character of Neo-Classicism, appeared to be very well suited to the task of reviving the Jewish historical past, too. The luxuriant ornamentation of Oriental architecture concealing the architectural structure almost entirely prevents the building from conveying a message of any sort, thus obeying the ban on idolatry—YHVH can neither be seen nor personified. The "Hungarian architectural style", which was to reach its apex with the work of Ödön Lechner and his disciples with important architects of Jewish background among them, and which also found its points of reference in the East, combined with the 26
