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Britain's Prince Charles (R) and his wife Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall (2-R) are accompanied by congregation members as they listen to a recital by children during their visit to the synagogue in Budapest on March 18, 2010. Prince Charles and his wife Camilla are on the second day of their three-day visit in Hungary during their tour of central Europe.
Photo: Attila Kisbenedek in Budapest, AFP Copyright 2010
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BUDAPEST (EJP)---The Prince of Wales and Duchess of Cornwall, who are on a 4-day visit to Hungary, visited on Thursday the Budapest synagogue in Dohany street.
The royal couple’s visit is part of a tour of Central Europe which began in Poland and due to culminate in the Czech Republic.
Prince Charles and Camilla also visited the Holocaust memorial near the synagogue where they lit a candle in remembrance of the victims of the Nazis.
The Dohány Street Synagogue is the biggest synagogue in Europe and the second largest in the world.
Seating 3,000 people, the synagogue, which is 75m long and 27m wide, was built between 1854 and 1859 in the moorish revival style, based chiefly on models from North Africa and Spain.
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Britain's Prince Charles (L) reads the names of the Holocaust victims on leaves of the tree-sculpture of the Holocaust memorial place at the synagogue of Budapest on March 18, 2010 during their visit to the second biggest synagogue in the world.
Picture: Attila Kisbenedek in Budapest, AFP Copyright 2010
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Theodore Herzl, the visionary of the State of Israel and father of modern political Zionism, lived in a house next to the Dohany street Synagogue.
In the place of his house stands the Jewish Museum, which holds the Jewish religious and historical Collection, built in 1930 in accordance with the synagogue's architectural style and attached in 1931 to the main building.
Dohany street itself, a leafy street in the city center, constituted the border of the Budapest Ghetto set up by the Nazis during WWII. Around 650,000 Hungarian Jews were exterminated during this period, mainly in concentration camps.
Today, some 60,000 Jews live in Hungary, mainly in Budapest.