Síp utca 12, the address of the Jewish Council

Behind this facade sat the nerve centre of Jewish Hungary in 1944, and this is still the address of the Jewish community of Budapest. The corner building went up in 1891 for the Pesti Izraelita Hitközség, before the war one of the largest Jewish communities in the world, and it served at once as office, school and meeting hall.

On the morning of Sunday 19 March 1944, the annual meeting was under way here when word came in that German troops had crossed into the country. That same afternoon two of Eichmann's officers stood in the building, asking where chairman Samu Stern was. Two days later the Jewish Council existed, and every German order for the Hungarian Jews ran through this one address. Around eighteen hundred people worked here, on decrees and on the pleading letters that arrived from across the country. When a wall went up around the district in late November, this stayed the administration of the ghetto, soup kitchen and all.

In 2025 scaffolding went up around the old chimney on the grounds, and at the level of the second floor two bricks turned out to carry a date someone had scratched into them by hand: 1944 V 24 and 1944 VI 3. Those were exactly the weeks when the deportation trains were running to Auschwitz, and nobody knows who cut the dates into the stone.

We follow Síp utca down to Dohány utca and turn right there, towards the towers of the great synagogue.