Buda Synagogue on Öntőház Street, Budapest

Die jüdische Gemeinde

Jews lived in medieval and Ottoman Buda, but after an expulsion ordered by Maria Theresa in 1746 they were barred from the town, and resettlement began only in 1783 under Joseph II. The reorganised congregation, centred on the Víziváros district below the Castle, built its first synagogue in Öntőház utca in 1812 on a plot belonging to the builder András Dankó; a guidebook by Dóra and György Szegő instead places a first prayer house here around 1790, on the site of the medieval cannon foundry that gave the street its name. By the 1860s a larger and more representative building was wanted, and Knabe's synagogue provided 728 seats, 428 for men and 300 for women. The Buda community kept its independence after Buda, Óbuda and Pest were united in 1873. As the Margit körút district and Lágymányos were built up it grew from a few hundred members to six or seven thousand between the wars, opened a second synagogue in Zsigmond (now Frankel Leó) utca in 1888 and a third in Lágymányos in 1936, and repeatedly declined to merge with the far larger Pest community.

Architektur und Gestaltung

Knabe's 1865 drawings, preserved in the Budapest City Archives, show a rectangular two-storey hall flanked by lower side wings, with rows of pews on the ground floor and galleries on three sides above. The street front was strongly influenced by Ludwig Förster's synagogues in Vienna and in Dohány utca: slender octagonal, minaret-like piers rose above the cornice and carried four small onion domes; twin round-arched windows in the centre were surmounted by a rose window with a Star of David, and the gable, edged by a dentilled cornice, ended in the Tablets of the Law. The doors opened in the plain side wings. Photographs of about 1943 show the rendered façade and its ribbed finials hemmed into the narrow street. Inside, according to the Szegős, the oriental character was more pronounced than on the façade. A photograph taken before the 1942 fire shows slender columns carrying galleries with turned wooden balustrades, a flat ceiling, round-headed windows glazed with Stars of David, and a rectangular Ark recess in a dark frame beneath a Hebrew verse (Exodus 25:22) and the Tablets, flanked by tall seven-branched candelabra.

Leben in der Synagoge

The synagogue followed the Neolog rite and was the main temple (főtemplom) of the Buda Israelite Community, which also ran the Újlak and, later, Lágymányos synagogues under a single set of temple regulations issued in 1922; these fixed the start of the Sabbath morning service at ten o'clock and laid down rules of dress and decorum. Arnold Kiss, poet, translator and author of the women's prayer book Mirjam, was chief rabbi from 1901 until his death in 1940; Bertalan Edelstein served beside him as rabbi from 1902 until his death in 1934. A 1928 directory names Henrik Fischer as chief cantor and Károly Baracs as president. On 30 May 1906, the first day of Shavuot, ten girls took a vow of fidelity to their faith here, the first such confirmation ceremony in Budapest. During the First World War the Jewish pupils of the district's municipal girls' school attended Friday-afternoon services in the building. In the early 1920s the community still hoped to replace it with a new temple on Krisztina körút.

Zerstörung

The first blow was a fire. Museum photographs dated 16 October 1942 are captioned as showing the interior after the fire of February 1942; they record charred galleries, fallen floors and scorched walls beneath a ceiling that still held. Later accounts date the fire to 1943 and blame a candle left burning. Photographs by Angelo, dated about 1943 by the holding library, show the street front still standing. During the Siege of Budapest in the winter of 1944–45, when the Soviet Red Army fought the Nazi German and Hungarian forces holding Castle Hill directly above the street, the building was hit and reduced to a roofless shell. One writer speaks of a bomb, but no source consulted says whose fire struck it. Archive inventories of 1957 and 1965 record simply that Knabe's synagogue perished in 1944–45. After the war the authorities had the ruin pulled down, as were the other houses of the street. The year of the clearance is not established; a Hungarian Wikipedia list gives about 1945, so it is unclear whether it preceded the Communist takeover.

Das Schicksal der Gemeinde

Between the wars some six to seven thousand Jews lived in Buda. In the winter of 1944–45, under the Arrow Cross regime installed during the Nazi German occupation, armed Arrow Cross men attacked the Jewish hospitals of Buda: on 12 January 1945 a group led by the Arrow Cross friar known as Father Kun murdered 92 people at the Buda Chevra Kadisha hospital in Maros utca, and the Orthodox hospital in Városmajor utca was attacked in the same weeks. Pál Vidor, rabbi of the Újlak synagogue, died in 1945; Imre Benoschofsky, another of the community's rabbis, was taken for forced labour but survived and later became national chief rabbi. With the Öntőház utca synagogue destroyed, the survivors reorganised religious life around the Frankel Leó utca synagogue, which is still in use, and the Lágymányos synagogue, which was nationalised in 1950. The diminished Buda community resisted amalgamation to the end; it was merged with the Pest community in 1949 under state pressure, after which its properties were nationalised.

Der Ort heute

Öntőház utca still exists as a short, quiet lane on the eastern slope of Castle Hill, running behind the houses of Lánchíd utca a little south of Clark Ádám tér, but nothing of its pre-war fabric survives. According to a 2013 survey of Jewish Buda, every house in the street was demolished along with the synagogue and the street itself was reshaped: part of the old line is now the road climbing from Clark Ádám tér and its retaining wall. A 2008 description calls it a street of back entrances lined by the dark castle wall, with a single modern three-storey block of flats. The exact footprint of the synagogue at nos 5–7 has not been plotted against today's layout, and no memorial on the site is mentioned in the sources consulted.

Bedeutende Namen

Arnold Kiss

1869–1940Chief rabbi of Buda, 1901–1940; poet and translator

Born Adolf Klein in Ungvár and trained at the Budapest Rabbinical Seminary, Kiss served in Zsolna and Veszprém before the Buda community elected him chief rabbi in 1901. He preached in the Öntőház utca main temple for almost four decades; during his tenure it hosted Budapest's first Shavuot confirmation of girls in 1906. He also taught Hebrew literature at the Seminary and was known for his poetry, translations and the women's prayer book Mirjam.

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Bertalan Edelstein

1876–1934Rabbi of Buda 1902–1934 (chief rabbi from 1924 according to his biography)

A Budapest-born graduate of the Rabbinical Seminary, Edelstein was elected rabbi of the Buda community in 1902 and served beside Arnold Kiss at the Öntőház utca synagogue for more than thirty years. He taught at the Seminary and at the Árpád grammar school, edited the Buda community's bulletin and chronicled Hungarian Jewish life year by year.

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Károly Baracs

UnknownPresident of the Buda Israelite Community (1920s)

A court councillor and railway director, Baracs is listed as president of the Buda Israelite Community in the 1928 Budapest directory, alongside chief rabbi Arnold Kiss and rabbi Bertalan Edelstein, in the years when the congregation recovered ownership of its Öntőház utca synagogue. The Hungarian Jewish Museum also records him as president of the Hungarian Jews' Pro Palestine Association.

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Ignác Knabe

c. 1825–1887Architect and master builder

A Buda master builder and member of the builders' guild from 1851, Knabe signed the 1865 plans for the two-storey 'Israelite temple' in Öntőház utca, which are preserved in the Budapest City Archives. A Hungarian art lexicon names the Moorish-style Buda synagogue as his principal work. He went on to design the synagogue of Szentes (1868–72) and worked widely on houses and industrial buildings in Buda.

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