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

The study of Jewish sacral architecture requires distinguishing two types of space. One is a sacral space of terrestrial assemblage—the synagogue—, the other is the Temple of Solomon or, after its destruction, the ideal space of a heavenly Temple.

This book introduces the synagogues of Budapest—earthly houses spared the devastations of the twentieth century more in Budapest than elsewhere in Europe. There was no Kriitaiinacht here and no synagogues were set on fire. Since King St. Stephen 1, greater tolerance was extended here to the Jews than in other countries of Christian Europe, and that tolerance made possible the construction of more synagogues.

Since the Enlightenment, Hungary's Jewry has been a major force behind modernisation, and its synagogues have key significance in the country’s architecture; that is why they are worthy of attention on account of their aesthetic value as well as the witness they bear to the course of history. Since the Holocaust, several synagogues have been demolished, allowed to fall into decay or else put to various forms of unworthy use. The number of active worshippers among the country's Jewish population continued to diminish during the Socialist era, and they were thus less and less able to maintain their synagogues. What the Jewish faith required was the worship of the Torah rather than respect for the synagogue.

The architecture of synagogues in the post-Enlightenment era has displayed certain analogies with Christian architecture, which has regarded the Temple of Solomon as a major point of reference throughout its history. The emancipated and assimilating Jewry of the 19th and 20th centuries also did much to bring the synagogue ever closer in architectural and liturgical appearance to the Christian church, precisely in the period when the progress of urban development was accelerating in the Central European region. The function of the ark (the depository of the Torah) along the Eastern wall is analogous to that of the Christian altar. The position of the bimah or almemor (the Torah-reading rostrum) wandered between the centre and the mizrah-side (east) rostrum, mirroring the role played by the Christian pulpit, another fixture without a fixed place.

The genius of a place cannot be appreciated without knowing its history. Here the history is that of the one-time congregation and where its members came from and where they were going to when the construction, reconstruction or extension was undertaken. That is why it is essential to depict the history not only of the particular building but of its neighbourhood, too. Due to the traditional ban on figurái representation, these houses can but seldom boast artworks of rare individual value: the history of the decorative and litur5