A congregation’s house – a gallery – a second-hand clothes shop
Former synagogues in Hungary
MúzeumCafé 16.
The synagogue is not a temple. In Judaism the temple signifies the two biblical Jerusalem sanctuaries which all Jews tried to reach on pilgrimage holidays. In line with medieval prohibitions, synagogues could not directly open onto streets and thus were built in the Jewish quarter inside a ‘judenhof’ (Jewish courtyard) on a protected plot surrounded by houses. The synagogues and the connecting buildings constructed before emancipation had everything Jewish life required: a rabbinical court, a ritual bath and accommodation for those passing through. Frequent persecution and migration did not favour the preservation and passing on of material goods. In Hungary art history, archaeology, ethnography and history became independent branches of science with their own institutions in the second half of the 19th century. In this context, analysis of Jewish communities living as minorities in the various nation states were not included in the scope of the new sciences. The first work to included synagogues in architectural history was the now influential The Architecture of Classicism in Hungary by Anna Zádor and Jenő Rados, published in 1943. Architect Manó Pollák was the first to consider surveying and protecting historic Jewish buildings, primarily synagogues. In the 1930s he extensively researched the history of synagogue architecture in Hungary and in April 1935 he gave an account of his research in Múlt és Jövő (Past and Future), suggesting a committee for the protection of historic buildings be established within the National Jewish Congress. Pollák died in 1937 without the committee being formed. His colleagues Fülöp Grünvald, Ernő Naményi and György Balázs in the Hungarian Jewish Museum Association continued his work and announced the foundation of the National Committee of Hungarian Jewish Historic Buildings in 1943. World War II and the Holocaust brought destruction to buildings and furnishings alike. After confining the Jewish population in ghettos, state secretary for domestic affairs László Endre issued a decree on religious Jewish properties. Pursuant to the decree, several places in Hungary were to see the demolition of synagogues and Jewish public buildings except for those regarded as architecturally significant. They would have been owned by the Hungarian Research Institute of the Jewish Question, an institution set up on the lines of the Institut zur Erforschung der Judenfrage in Frankfurt to preserve as museums the memory of the exterminated Jewish community. In the end the buildings were not demolished. In 1945, 263 Jewish communities were again functioning but the number of believers was small and in many places even the quorum for common prayer was missing. By 1947, 101 were formed again out of the 204 Neolog and Status Quo communities operating in 1944, though only 14 of the former 74 rabbis were left. Ernő Naményi and Fülöp Grünvald tried to survey the synagogues and the surviving objects – in September 1945 they wrote a letter to the Jewish communities requesting an account concerning the communities’ archives, library, the remaining Torah scrolls, liturgical objects, cemeteries and synagogues. The replies constituted the first survey of Jewish buildings and objects in Hungary. In 1945 only the building of the Dohány Street synagogue was protected in Hungary. It had been classified as a listed building in 1930 in a way contradictory to the then practice in order that a wing of the building would be saved from demolition. After 1945 applications were made for several buildings to be protected: the first application was made for the Óbuda synagogue built in 1821, a later one was for the Baroque synagogue in Mád. After the Holocaust, maintenance and the repair of war damage presented a severe problem for the depopulated provincial communities. The National Rabbinate examined the following issues: can a synagogue be sold? If yes, in which cases, who can be authorised to conduct the sale and what should happen with the income? The answers uncovered a variety of problems. Tradition says that if a village has only a single synagogue it cannot be sold under any circumstances, yet if there is another, usable synagogue one of them can be sold and the resulting income must be spent on some worthy aim. In compliance with plans worked out in the 1950s, only a few synagogues were sold; however, the situation changed considerably after 1956. Many Jewish community members who were religious and who frequented a synagogue on an everyday basis left Hungary. Notable Jewish communities were left only in a few, larger provincial towns, while the majority of Jews remaining in Hungary lived in Budapest. The provincial Jewry’s memory was represented by the built heritage – the remaining synagogues and cemeteries. At the same time, state policy also changed and significant pressure was put on the National Centre of Hungarian Israelites to sell synagogues, which in some cases were regularly attended. That was the time when synagogues closed in Budapest and a number of provincial synagogues were sold to the state or the local authority. There were synagogues which no one wanted to maintain, and the buildings which became dangerous to life or simply ‘ideologically unsuitable’ were cleared from town centres, as exemplified by the demolition of the synagogue in Makó after 1965. The values the synagogues represented as relics of the Jewish community in terms of art history and urban protection were not mentioned during those times, just as no other areas of sciences were or could be concerned with issues of the Jewish past. Real change came only with the setting up of the Judaistic Research Group within the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in 1988. An architectural survey of synagogues by Anikó Gazda was among its first publications. At a meeting of Austrian and Hungarian specialists in Schlaining in 1994 András Román spoke about the history of synagogue architecture and the need for protection. Today from among the former 600 buildings of Jewish religious worship only 53 are protected as historic structures by the National Office for Cultural Heritage. After many years of privation, the synagogue in Mád was restored in 2004. The preservation of the one in Bonyhád has been secured since 2002, but its complete renovation remains only a plan at present.