Holocaust Memorial Center

This guide to the Holocaust Memorial Center in Budapest opens in 1924, when this hall was one of the city's grandest synagogues, its gilded pillars painted the blue of Solomon's Temple and its verses promising love for one's neighbor. It follows the industrialist who funded it and the two decades of prayer that filled the room, then turns to 1944, when German and Hungarian forces repurposed the building for a very different use during the roundup of Budapest's Jews. Afterward the building sat neglected for decades, pressed into service as a kosher kitchen, a seniors' club and a storeroom for a community too diminished to fill it.