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

The Kelenföld Competition and the Former Bocskai út Synagogue

igios. Designs entered in the 1912 competition all envisaged a monumental, detached synagogue—the one by the Löffler brothers was for a temple similar to the Kazinczy utca synagogue, while Béla Lajta planned something reminiscent of the Jewish Secondary School in Abonyi utca. Construction work was prevented by the outbreak of World War 1. Another, 1929, competition invited designs for a complex to include a synagogue, a school and an apartment block and to be built on the corner plot at Váli út. Rising above the standard of other competitors was Lajos Kozma's unadorned stone building, formed of a simple cube with the arrangement of its apertures creating one huge symbolic allusion to the tablets of the law. In a way characteristic of the reigning mood in the community, the traditional design submitted by Baumhorn and Somogyi carried the day. Among the variants prepared by the latter two, there was one plan for a building rotated on its corner, comparable in its arrangement to Lajta’s polygonal design made for the Lipótváros competition or to the Páva utca synagogue.

Eventually, it was to plans by Ede Novak and István Hamburger that the new synagogue was actually built in 1936, at 37 Bocskai út. The temple represented a radical break with the Art Nouveau and historicist tendencies characterising the first decades of the 20th century. The temple became the clearest specimen of the Bauhaus style in Hungary's synagogue architecture, realizing as it did the spa■ The original ground plan oh the iynagogue in Bonkai út by Anikó Gazda

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