Szegő Dóra - Szegő György: Synagogues - Our Budapest (Budapest, 2004)
The Dessewffy utca Synagogue
ient nation and participation in its social-political life were, however, permissible. Fischer embodied this duality in his own practice: although he normally preached in Hungarian, on the two "High Sabbaths" he gave his sermons in Yiddish. Precisely seventy years after the consecration of the Rombach, "in late August 1941,16 to 18 thousand Jews, deported from Hungary on account of their unclarified citizenship to Kameniec-Podolsk, were murdered there by the Nazis", according to a memorial plaque recently unveiled by the entrance. A detention camp for the deportees was set up in the synagogue. Although liturgical life was revived after the end of World War I, the depleted Jewry stopped using the synagogue in 1959. That marked the beginning of the building's rapid deterioration. In 1979, the roof above the Ark caved in, and then it collapsed between the street-front and the dome, too. After that, the community sold the building. Begun after privatisation in the late 1980s, the renovation of the building has been all but completed by now. The idea of giving it the profane function of a stock-exchange was raised at one point. Swayed by the press and public opinion, the owners backed down. A few years ago the property was considered as a possible venue to house the Hungarian Holocaust Museum. Although the proprietorship reverted to the Jewish community in 2003, no final decision has been taken yet. Hundreds of thousands of tourists crowd the Terézváros every year, eager to discover turn- of-the century cultural relics. It would be a worthwhile venture to utilize the religious, cultural and architectural potentials inherent to the triangle of the Dohány, the Rombach, and the Kazinczy synagogues. Comparable in importance to the Jewish quarter of Prague, the district has already been recommended for protection as an "ante-room” of the buildings belonging to the World Heritage here. The Dessewffy utca Synagogue City Park had emerged as a major recreational site for the citizenry of Pest by the late 19th century, and this area was accessible by way of Király utca, the axis of the Jewish quarter. Once a promenade, the street was gradually transformed by the settlement here of a Jewish population. Having become a crowded shopping precinct, the street became a bottleneck, turned into a daily marketplace by vendors occupying the entire pavement with their wares. This was deemed unworthy of an increasingly European-style Pest by the elite of the city who had been wont to ride, in carriages or on horseback, along the street in earlier times. The street was thus replaced in its earlier function by Sugár út (today's Andrássy út), a glamorous avenue built as part of a daringly ambitious city-planning project. Opened in 1885 to the public, the new thor42
