Szegő Dóra - Szegő György: Synagogues - Our Budapest (Budapest, 2004)
The Nagy Fuvaros utca Synagogue
Opened in 2004, the centre was constructed, after a competition in 2000, on designs submitted by the Ybl-prize winning architect István Mányi. After public and professional debates given much press coverage, the decision was made to preserve the building’s original synagogue form. Mányi raised nine-metre high wings around the building. In the arcades formed by the wings will be placed smoke-tinted glass-enamel plaques inscribed with the names of the 600,000 Hungarian Jewish victims of the Holocaust, in accordance with the wishes of the Hungarian Auschwitz Foundation and to plans by designer László Zsótér. The wall between the synagogue and the street has thus been enlarged, altering the spatial effect of the monumental temple. The architect's intention in radically isolating the memorial space from the surrounding urban spaces was to highlight the enormous disjunction that the Shoah was part of, starkly apart from the order of peaceful everyday life. Critics of the plan maintain that this segregation does little to achieve the purpose of the centre, which is to help the collective memory face the tragedy of Hungary's Jewry. However, the opening ceremony of the world's fifth Holocaust memorial vindicated the designer. From the street, one is greeted by a sculptural decoration composed of Indian stone and uniting thousand-year-old traditions of building memorial structures with the elements of contemporary architecture. The iron gate is the work of György Seregi, while the courtyard and the roof garden were designed by Péter Török. Housed in the buildings are the Holocaust Museum, the documentation centre, the written and printed records, the library, and the audio-visual archives (with interior decoration by István Szenes and László Gergely and stained-glass windows by Klára Szilárd and Birgit Köblitz). The centre will function as a research and educational site from 2005. Alongside the partition-walls of the complex, an office block was built for the documentation centre, while the exhibition halls are in the basement and inside the former synagogue. The permanent exhibition has not opened yet. What has been completed, however, is the first new synagogue built in Budapest since World War II—the prayer-house on the corner of the plot has been constructed for the community of the Tűzoltó utca neighbourhood. The Nagy Fuvaros utca Synagogue At the end of the 19th century, a major component of the population inhabiting Külső-Józsefváros, or Outer Joseph Town, the district east of József Boulevard, was made up of penurious Jews from Galicia and the East of the country—mainly artisans, journeymen, retailers, pedlars and clerical employees. In the neighbourhood around Nagy Fuvaros utca and Népszínház utca, which lay closer to József 7'
