The Dohany Street Synagogue (Dohany utcai zsinagoga) is the largest synagogue in Europe and the second-largest in the world, occupying a monumental building on Dohany utca in the historic Jewish quarter of the Pest side of Budapest. The synagogue is the principal place of worship of the Neolog (reform) Jewish community of Hungary, seats around three thousand worshippers, and is one of the most important visitor attractions and one of the most significant Jewish heritage sites anywhere in central Europe. The synagogue was built between 1854 and 1859 to a design by the Viennese architect Ludwig Forster in a striking Moorish Revival style, with two great onion-domed towers framing a richly patterned brick facade decorated in bands of red, yellow and blue glazed ceramic. The Moorish design - drawing on the architecture of the Iberian and North African Jewish world - was intended to express a distinct Jewish architectural identity, and the great twin towers and the rose window over the central portal give the building the silhouette of a basilica, reflecting the integrationist outlook of the nineteenth-century Hungarian Neolog community. The composer Franz Liszt and the young Camille Saint-Saens both played the synagogue's great organ. The synagogue stands at the heart of what became the Budapest Ghetto during the Second World War. After the German occupation of Hungary in 1944, the surrounding district was sealed off as a ghetto into which the Jews of Budapest were confined, and tens of thousands died there in the final winter of the war. The garden beside the synagogue holds a mass grave of around two thousand victims, and the adjoining Raoul Wallenberg Memorial Park - named for the Swedish diplomat who saved tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews - holds the moving Tree of Life memorial, a weeping-willow sculpture in metal whose leaves are inscribed with the names of Holocaust victims. The synagogue complex also includes the Hungarian Jewish Museum, built on the site of the birthplace of Theodor Herzl, the founder of modern Zionism, and the Heroes' Temple. The synagogue is open to visitors Sunday to Friday outside service times, with hours varying by season, and admission includes access to the museum, the memorial garden and the Tree of Life. Guided tours are available in several languages.

Type: Tourist Attraction

Address: Dohany utca 2, Budapest, Hungary

Capacity: 3000

Opening Date: 01/01/1859