Szeged Synagogue
Szegedi zsinagóga
Interesting facts
- The stained-glass windows, devised with Rabbi Immánuel Lőw, portray the Jewish festivals using only plants and ritual objects, with no human figures at all.
- Lőw succeeded his own father, the reformer Leopold Lőw, as rabbi of Szeged in 1878 and served the city for more than six decades.
- Lőw's four-volume study of the plants of Jewish tradition, Die Flora der Juden, was largely written while he was imprisoned in 1920–21.
- From 1927 Lőw represented Hungary's Neolog Jewish communities in the upper house of the Hungarian parliament.
- In 1944, close to his 90th birthday, Lőw was put on a deportation train with Szeged's Jews; taken off in Budapest, he died there that July.
- The garden around the synagogue was laid out to Lőw's plans with plants of the Holy Land and of Hungary, continuing the botanical theme outdoors.
- The building measures about 48 by 35 metres and rises to nearly 49 metres at its highest point.
- The interior mixes Art Nouveau with Moorish Revival motifs, and a ribbed Gothic Revival wall rises above the organ, an instrument typical of Neolog worship.
Why it is worth it
Szeged, the lively university city on the Tisza in southern Hungary, was largely rebuilt after the great flood of 1879, and its Jewish community marked that new era with one of the most beautiful synagogues of the Art Nouveau age. Lipót Baumhorn, the most prolific synagogue architect of Austria-Hungary, won the design competition in 1897 and later counted Szeged as his finest work; the building went up between 1900 and 1903. With 1,300 seats it is the second-largest synagogue in Hungary after Dohány Street in Budapest.
Much of its character comes from Chief Rabbi Immánuel Lőw, a scholar of the plants of the Bible, who worked closely with Baumhorn on the decoration. The interior is conceived as a garden of scripture: painted and carved flowers and trees, some chosen as plants of the Land of Israel, others as the flora of Hungary, climb the walls in ivory, blue and gold. The door of the Torah ark is of acacia wood from the Nile — the wood named in the Bible for the Tabernacle — and its hinges take the shape of hyssop; the altar stone is closed with Jerusalem marble. On the triumphal arch, "Love your neighbour as yourself" is written in Hebrew and in Hungarian.
The crown of the building is its dome, rising 32 metres above the floor and glazed with coloured glass from the Róth workshop in Budapest — long credited to Miksa Róth, now attributed to his brother Manó. At its centre sits a Star of David surrounded by a burst of rays; the whole dome is read as an image of the created world and the heavens, and when light comes through, the hall turns blue and gold. The synagogue still holds occasional services and, thanks to its acoustics, is also used for concerts.
Getting there
The synagogue stands on Jósika utca in central Szeged, about 400 metres from the city centre. The nearest airport is Arad International Airport (ARW) in Romania, about 87 km away; most visitors come instead through Budapest Liszt Ferenc International Airport (BUD), about 150 km away in a straight line. Direct MÁV trains from Budapest-Nyugati reach Szeged in about two and a half hours.
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
The Szeged Synagogue, also called the Great Synagogue and the New Synagogue, is a Neolog Jewish congregation and synagogue, located at Josika ut. 10, in Szeged, in the county of Csongrád-Csanád, Hungary.
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