It felt like a return to Jewish life back home. For lunch, we shared a hummus platter, matzoh ball soup, chicken paprikash, and a fascinating Israeli bean stew called cholent, typically eaten on the Sabbath. We followed it up with a trip to the Dohány Street Synagogue, the largest synagogue in Europe, impeccably decorated with elements of medieval Spanish and Islamic art. The inside was a full-blown identity crisis: brass chandeliers, a choral organ that towered under two Moorish onion domes, and a rose stained-glass window. Bordering the Budapest Ghetto, the Synagogue, much like the Old New Synagogue in Prague, comprised the ill-fated holy trinity of European Jewish landmarks: graveyard, memorial, and museum.
I found myself thinking—of all things—about my high school classmates, and how many of them had roots that traced back to Budapest. After all, our tour guide—a straight-faced, older Jewish man in the tradition of Frank Costanza—reported that following the near-destruction of the synagogue during WWII, funding for the renovation was taken up predominantly by influential New York Jews. Certainly, any number of my former classmates could have taken pilgrimages to the synagogue over the years; I could have sworn I’d even seen Lauren Levine, standing by the weeping willow sculpture, whose leaves bear inscriptions with names and tattoo numbers of the dead.
It wasn’t the only false alarm of the day. Courtney and I tried to track down a portion of the original Ghetto Wall—eventually moonlighting as part of a Spanish tour group—only to discover that the courtyard of a high-rise apartment complex we entered was merely where the Wall stood up until its demolition a few years’ prior. The area around the Ghetto had developed as you might expect: fancy bars, high-end art galleries, bros in hot pink tank-tops. It would surely have been unrecognizable to anyone with even the faintest connection to its past.
But what else is new? So often it is only our memories that remain after the past is paved over. And so, we leaned in. I bought a strawberry donut Frappuccino from the nearby Starbucks and we ambled awe-struck—like true tourists—over to the New York Palace Hotel, a longtime center for Hungarian literature and poetry. The gaudy ornamentation, complete with sixteen lamp-bearing stone fauns, had itself, I learned, also been rebuilt after WWII—and also by New York Jews.
In the evening, we visited Gellért Baths, the most famous of the many bath complexes in Budapest. Before I arrived, I pictured the public pool in Red Hook, where on weekends in the summer me and my sister used to visit with my dad. The pool was always mobbed: children with their parents, teenagers trying to impress their dates, serious athletes doing laps. It was built just before WWII and owned—are we sensing a theme here?—by the Goldman family in New York.
I’d just stepped into the first pool at Gellért when I wondered about the Jewish fascination with water. Bathing is referenced in the Bible not only for cleanliness but also for ritual. The Talmud declares it forbidden for a scholar to reside in a city without a public bath. The mikveh, a bath used for the purpose of ritual immersion, is central to the Orthodox community. The Gellert Baths remained open throughout WWII and survived almost wholly intact. The thermal baths contain water from nearby mineral hot springs, in addition to saunas, plunge pools, and—yes—even a swimming pool, though unlike the one in Red Hook, enclosed by an Art-Nouveau style glass roof. Whether it’s the healing properties of the water or a miracle of faith that’s kept the Baths running, I can’t say. But when I dunked my head underwater and emerged revived, I was thankful for some experiences that manage to stay the same.