The Jewish Quarter

Balancing remembrance and renewal is no easy task, yet Budapest’s Jewish Quarter manages it with sensitivity. This part of the city now pulses with life—festivals, cafés, and the famous “ruin bars,” housed in once-abandoned buildings furnished with reclaimed odds and ends. But beneath this vibrant present lies a far more somber history. In late 1944, these very streets were turned into a ghetto by Hungary’s fascist, antisemitic Arrow Cross Party. Around 70,000 Jews were forcibly confined within this small 0.26-square-kilometre area, while more than 200,000 Jews lived in Budapest at the time. Most faced deportation, execution, or starvation. By the time the city was liberated in January 1945, only about 70,000 Jews remained. The horrors of the Holocaust, followed by decades of urban transformation, erased many visible traces of this once-thriving community. But not all of them. Just ahead, less than 15 meters from here, stands the luminous Rumbach Synagogue, left abandoned for more than sixty years. Built in 1872 by a young Otto Wagner—an Austrian architect who would later become a key figure in European architecture—it’s a striking blend of Moorish and Art Nouveau styles. Its vibrant polychrome brick façade is impossible to miss.