In many parts of Europe, you notice the absence of Jewish life in once thriving Jewish neighborhoods. You see synagogues that are now museums. You see graveyards that haven’t been used since before WWII. Prague had only one synagogue, out of at least six, where services were actually still conducted. Budapest, however, has a visible, living community. Although the current 80,000 Jews in Budapest are about half the pre-war estimates (when they made up nearly twenty-five percent of the city’s population), it is still the largest community of any city in Central Europe today. Walking through the old Jewish Quarter (which also now happens to have a large Roma population), you see Jewish shops, restaurants, and, of course, synagogues - ones still used as houses of worship. Central Synagogue is actually the second largest in the
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