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

The Kelenföld Competition and the Former Bocskai út Synagogue

dox congregation with progressive leanings. On both sides are arched doors, similar to the apertures of the organ gallery, which once led to the rabbi's and the hazzaris residence. Above the "stage" of the Eastern wall spread over the entire width of the wall is the Hebrew inscription: "Blessed, blessed and blessed is the Lord, his glory fills the whole Earth".

In accordance with orthodox traditions, the bimah, a construction with a rectangular ground plan bordered on the side with block-like elements, was placed in the centre of the interior. Light poured in through five arched windows with stained glass panes.

The immediate antecedents of the design made by the Hamburger-Novák duo for the Kelenföld synagogue were identified by Ilona Brestyánszky as the temple building created by Fritz Landauer in the style of Le Corbusier and built in Plauen, Germany, in 1930, and Peter Behrens's modern synagogue raised in Zsolna in 1931. There is no real contradiction about the fact that the pioneering example of Hungary's Bauhaus-style synagogue-construction was built for an Orthodox community. The functionalist approach that it represents logically followed from the fact that the original design made provisions, as seen about Baum- horn's plans made a few years earlier, for a modern, four-classroom elementary school and a residential unit, which were not eventually built. As well as determining the functions of the various rooms, Chief Rabbi Dr. Imre Benoschofsky identified the motifs to be used on the stained-glass windows. Thus the congregation saw it more as a counterpart of the Heroes’ Temple rather than the first, programmatic liturgical and architectural specimen of a new, unfulfilled era in the history of synagogue building in Hungary.

The building continued to function as a synagogue until i960,when the diminished Jewish community of the neighbourhood furnished its new, and more modest, prayer-house in a detached private house in Károli Gáspár tér. After the Bocskai út synagogue was turned over to the Society for the Dissemination of Scientific Knowledge it was restored in the spirit of 1960s pseudo-modernism with no respect to its original architectonic merits. The interior was completely rebuilt to suit the purposes of a complex of offices and lecture halls. The only surviving reminder of the building’s original function as a Jewish temple is the menorah-motif on the wrought-iron railing of the garden-wall. The stained-glass panes in the synagogue windows were salvaged and taken to the Rabbinical Seminary.

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