After 60 years of decay, Budapest’s Rumbach synagogue has a new lease on life

The richly renovated synagogue compound – a WWII deportation point for Jews sent to their deaths – has been remade into a Jewish cultural centre

SEVERAL DOZEN MEMBERS of the Hungarian Jewish community shuffled down Budapest’s busy Karoly thoroughfare on Thursday afternoon, accompanied by a trumpet, French horn and trombone blowing marchy Jewish standards.

Their destination, the Rumbach Synagogue, was located just down a quiet side street a few hundred feet from its well-known counterpart, the Great Synagogue on Dohany Street — the largest Jewish house of worship in Europe and second-largest in the world.

And though last Thursday’s jubilant procession marking the Rumbach’s rededication and celebrating the reception of its inaugural Torah scroll started in the Dohany Synagogue’s garden, event organisers decided they would take the long way around.

The community’s most prominent members took turns carrying the Torah beneath the traditional four-posted wedding canopy, two-stepping around bewildered patrons at streetside tables who put down their doner kebabs and beers to gawk.

FULL STORY After 60 years of decay, Budapest’s grand Rumbach synagogue has new lease on life (Times of Israel)

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Photo: Cantor Immanuel Zucker sings Psalms at the reopening ceremony of the Rumbach Synagogue, June 10 (Akos Szentgyorgyi)