Rumbach Street Synagogue

This guide to Rumbach Street Synagogue in Budapest opens with the summer of 1941, when Hungarian officials turned the building into a holding pen for anyone who could not prove citizenship, before marching them toward trains bound for Ukraine. It reaches back to 1868, when a young Otto Wagner, decades before his fame in Vienna, won the design competition with an octagonal dome modeled on Jerusalem's Dome of the Rock and a striped Moorish facade unlike any synagogue Budapest had seen. You will hear about the Status Quo Ante congregation the building was built for, and the decades it spent standing open to rain and pigeons before it reopened.