On Saturday morning, I went to the Dohany Synagogue for services. We had toured the synagogue earlier in the week, but this was my first experience at a Jewish prayer service in Budapest. The Dohany Synagogue follows the Neolog tradition of Judaism which is similar to the Positive-Historical school that developed in Germany in the mid-19th century (shout-out to my Modern Jewish History students who just studied this!) and to early American Conservative Judaism. The shul uses a traditional Ashkenazi liturgy and is completely non-egalitarian. Men and women sit separately, although there is no mechitza separating them. The beginning of shacharit was dramatically marked by an organ melody that filled the room, and most of the parts of the service that the congregation answers the cantor were sung by a male choir. Ashrei and Ein Keloheinu were two particularly lovely and signature cantorial duets accompanied by the organ. The effect was a solemn and dramatic performance, but it didn’t stop the congregants from chatting and socializing throughout. The whole service with a traditional liturgy and a full torah reading AND the cantorial pieces lasted less than two hours, shocking to my American sensibilities.
Later that day, we toured the Jewish quarter with its mix of active-use synagogues, kosher restaurants, and mikvah, and old synagogues and Jewish institutions that are currently empty and looking for repurposing. In reality, this isn’t much different from the experience of driving around DC, but most people don’t think of their own communities in this way. We also learned of the internal tensions between the Neolog communities and Chabad, as well as tensions between the Jewish community’s and the government’s ways of commemorating the Holocaust and Communism. We ended our tour at the Shoe Memorial which commemorates the murder of 3500 Hungarians, many of them Jews, when the Arrow Cross shot them into the Danube River in 1944-45. The memorial includes sixty pairs of period shoes which represent the different types of people who were killed there.
It’s been such an amazing week of teaching, learning, and living here in Budapest. I can’t wait to return next year.
