The story of this place
Consecrated in 1859, the Dohány Street Synagogue is the largest in Europe and the second largest in the world, seating nearly 3,000 beneath twin onion-domed towers in an exotic Moorish Revival style. Theodor Herzl, the founder of modern Zionism, was born in a house next door. During WWII the synagogue stood at the edge of the Budapest ghetto, where tens of thousands were confined; those who died of cold, hunger, and disease in the winter of 1944-45 were buried in mass graves in its courtyard — a rare thing in Jewish tradition, forced by catastrophe. Behind it a silver weeping-willow memorial, its metal leaves inscribed with victims' names, honours the roughly 600,000 Hungarian Jews murdered in the Holocaust.