Dohány Street Synagogue

The hall is laid out more like a basilica than a traditional synagogue. There are three aisles, two pulpits of the kind you see in churches, and women’s galleries on two levels along both sides. It seats nearly 3,000, with 1,497 places for men downstairs and 1,472 for women in the galleries, and at services men and women still sit separately.

The white and gold Ark at the far end, 8.2 metres high, was designed by Frigyes Feszl, the architect of the Vigadó concert hall, who took over the interior after Ludwig Förster left.

The organ is behind it. Services here were accompanied by an organ and a choir from the day the building opened, Franz Liszt played the instrument, and the present one was built by Jehmlich of Dresden in 1996.

The guided tour starts here. Find the flag for your language among the pews, sit down in that section, and the next guide comes to you. Several groups are being talked to at once, so sit close to yours.

Jewish tradition keeps cemeteries away from synagogues, and this one exists out of necessity. When the Budapest ghetto was liberated on 18 January 1945, thousands of bodies lay unburied in the streets around the building. More than 2,000 people were buried here in 24 common graves, in what had been laid out as a garden.

Some were identified and have their names on the stones. Many never were. Jewish law forbids exhuming the dead, so they have stayed.

The arcades around the garden and the domed building at the far end date from 1931. That building is the Heroes’ Temple, a 186-seat prayer hall designed by László Vágó in memory of the 10,000 Hungarian Jewish soldiers who died in the First World War.

It is used for services, so you may only see it from the courtyard. Look above its entrance for the Star of David made up of the Hebrew letters of a verse mourning the fallen.

Often overlooked by visitors moving quickly through the compound. Pause here even if you’ve spent your time elsewhere. It is a burial ground, and the synagogue asks everyone to behave accordingly.

Imre Varga’s weeping willow in metal stands on a red granite base at the centre of the Raoul Wallenberg Memorial Park behind the synagogue. It is the memorial to the Hungarian Jews killed in the Holocaust. The idea came from the actor Tony Curtis, who was of Hungarian descent, and the Emanuel Foundation he set up helped pay for it.

The artwork is designed to be read at close range. Families have had the names of relatives who were killed engraved on the leaves, so spend time at the base; the leaves are individual records, not symbols.

Photographs are fine. Posed ones in front of the tree are not what it is for.

The park around the tree is named after Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat who, with colleagues from other neutral countries, handed out protective papers and set up safe houses in Budapest in 1944. Between them they saved tens of thousands of Jews.

Look for the tablets carrying the names of rescuers, Hungarian and foreign, the stained-glass memorial panel behind them, and the plaque to Sir Nicholas Winton. Behind the synagogue, the Lapidarium keeps the old gravestones that were replaced when the cemetery was renovated, because Jewish law does not allow them to be hidden or thrown away. The inscription that once stood on the synagogue’s facade is there too.

Most people walk straight through after the tree. Give it ten minutes.

The Hungarian Jewish Museum fills the wing attached to the synagogue, finished in 1931 on the site of the house where Theodor Herzl was born. You go in through the same entrance and it is on the same ticket. The guided tour does not go in, though, and it is easy to leave without realising you could have. That would be a mistake.

Upstairs is the collection of Jewish religious art from Hungary and Eastern Europe, arranged around the festivals and the stages of a Jewish life. The museum’s free Milev app is the audio guide, so download it before you go in. The cellar holds the exhibition on the Budapest ghetto, which is mostly text and photographs and takes time to read properly.

Allow 45 minutes for the two. The cellar gets hot and crowded on summer afternoons, so go down there first if you arrive early.