OSA / Guide / Online gallery
in English / Hungarian
Rebuilding
Hungarian synagogues, prayer houses, prayer rooms 1980-1987,
an exhibition of selected photographs by Dr. Anikó Gazda
Rebuilding - Hungarian synagogues, prayer houses, prayer rooms 1980-87, an exhibition of selected photographs by Dr. Anikó Gazda is the latest exhibition organized by the Open Society Archives. During her painfully short life Anikó Gazda created, almost as a by-product of her extensive survey of settlement-structures, her map of Hungarian synagogues: one of the most remarkable achievements of the period in Central-Europe. Her camera memorialized the ephemeral architectural memories of an ephemeral community.
Out of 354 synagogues that existed before World War II, in 1987 Anikó Gazda found only seventy two in their original state both inside and out. In 2004 there are only forty-seven of them left. They are all registered national architectural heritage buildings - but most of them not in the service of the diminished Jewish community.
Where have the synagogues gone? And where have the less impressive prayer houses and prayer rooms gone? They have been turned into apartments, museums, galleries, furniture storage rooms, dressmakers' salons, greengrocers', gymnasiums, surgeries, bakeries or fire stations. Some of them have turned into ruins, overgrown with weeds, but most of them have simply disappeared without trace.
The Open Society Archives does not want merely to remember the one who remembered by displaying a selection of Anikó Gazda's photographs. OSA wants to generate ideas, initiate public debate about how we have lived, how we live together with oblivion, with our own past, with our gaps. This is why Ms Zsuzsanna Toronyi, researcher of the Hungarian Jewish Museum and Archives and Mr. Geza Komoroczy, Director of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences Judaism Research Center, have been invited to participate in a roundtable discussion on the occasion of the opening of the exhibition.
Introduction
