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

The Páva utca Synagogue

the scapegoating that followed the lost war (the white terror and the discriminatory numerui clamuó laws restricting the professional and educational opportunities of Hungary’s Jewry), insistence on Jewish traditions, religious and cultural identity became an ever more zealously-embraced alternative to a passive acceptance of exclusion by the majority. Thus dissimilation, as opposed to assimilation, also appeared to be a viable option, and one certainly not against the spirit characterising the Jewish communities of the period. An important means of sustaining local communities was the construction of new, or the reconstruction of old, synagogues with funds collected at home or large loans raised in Western countries. The new synagogues were now constructed centrally, around the bimah, as tradition dictated, rather than according to the nave-and-aisles arrangement of Christian churches expressing the idea of brotherhood in the spirit of 1848. Simultaneously, the longitudinally- organised Temple of Jerusalem was still a potent prototype. This presented the architect with an apparently unresolvable contradiction. Baumhorn found the solution of the dilemma in a daringly innovative structure for the Páva utca synagogue. The temple stands on an acute-angle corner of the irregular quadrangular plot with a ground-plan facing the courtyard and closed by three sides of an octagon set on the diagonal of the plot. With this groundplan, the archi■ The fiapade oh the synagog ue in Páva utca alter the reconstructs on

68