Landmarks

​When I am without Google Maps, I have to be sure to identify landmarks so I remember what street I should be walking on. The streets here are similar to Paris in that they radiate out from the center, and it’s like walking through an Old Town (which technically it is 😂).  Lots of curves and twists and turns! And then sometimes you disappear beneath the street because the crossing is too expansive to put crosswalks in. Then I need my UNDERGROUND landmarks as well.😂

My above ground landmarks…

And the below.  I numbered them, and there were two in total, so I knew if I came to a third, I had wandered onto the wrong street.  The sign I had to follow… always at a bi-section of stairways.  My exit was to the right.

And lastly, the ‘I am getting close’ landmark, also above ground. 😂

I had gotten lost in town a couple of times today, but I came across some very special things that I would have missed otherwise! And to make a correction from yesterday… I was in the historic Jewish temple, and today I ended up at the new Jewish temple quite by accident. So I took a stroll through there as well. It was vast and beautiful. Again, this is the second largest synagogue in the world! 

I found a second memorial in the basement of this synagogue for the Hungarian Jews who perished at the hands of the Nazi regime during World War II.  Even though Hungary wasn’t occupied by the Germans until March of 1944, the atrocities were many.  Several thousand Jewish people in Hungary were killed.  This common courtyard shown above is a  site of mass graves for the people who lived in Budapest, and most likely near the former synagogue, which is very close in proximity to the new one.  

You can see at the top (on the roof)  the two tablets representing those which had been carried down the mountain by Moses. 💕

After the Germans arrived in Hungary, they began forcing the Jewish population into a Jewish Ghetto, and then attempting to deport them to the death camps. Hungary decided to withdraw their willingness to let the Jewish citizens be sent to their deaths after a time (roughly 4 months), even though by now there were several rules and regulations that had literally taken away their livelihoods and had forced many (all) into starvation and poverty. Sadly, a short time after Hungary put a halt to the deportations, a second, antisemitic group came in, ‘Arrow’ something or other, (I apologize…I am dealing with information overload today) and they went on a rampage and killed several hundred more Jewish citizens in the streets of Budapest, in spite of Hungary’s efforts to stop the senseless deaths of the innocent. One of the worst of these mass killings took place in ‘The Square’ shown below, and I happened upon it, again by accident, this afternoon. They have a beautiful ‘living memorial’ to many of the people that were brutally murdered right here in this place.

A sad, sad period in our history. 😔