Pécs

Jews first settled in Pécs under individual residence permits at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. For a long while, the Jews of Pécs used a praying room in the house of one of their coreligionists, Péter Engel. The first synagogue was built following 1867, the year of Jewish emancipation. The community, which by then already had a school of Hungarian language instruction, an association for the visiting of the sick and a women’s association began construction thanks to funds raised by pre-selling the seats in the synagogue. The numerical value of the Hebrew letters in the inscription above the entrance saying „for my house will be called a house of prayer for all nations” equals 1868/69, the year of construction of the synagogue designed by architects Frigyes Feszl, Károly Gerster and Lipót Kauser. Besides Rabbi Ede Ehrlich of Pécs, Lipót Löw, one of the leading figures in the fight for Hungarianization and the emancipation of Jews also attended the dedication ceremony. The ground plan of the interior is elongated with the Bimah placed in the front of the Torah Ark instead of the traditional central location. The Torah Ark is a dome covered oriental structure. Majority of the pre-war community of about 3,000 was murdered during the Holocaust. Although surviving members revived the community after the war, no financial resources remained to maintain the synagogue. The temple began to decay and despite partial reconstruction works carried out in the past two decades, a full-scale renovation is yet to be seen.