Budapest Jewish Quarter Walk: A Self-Guided Route in 10 Stops

In the winter of 1944, nearly 70,000 people were shut inside the Pest ghetto in Budapest’s Jewish Quarter, behind a wall that ran through the back courtyard of Király utca 15. A memorial wall stands on that line today, a few steps from the cafés of Gozsdu udvar, and it is the reason to walk these streets slowly and by daylight.

The loop around it shows both halves of the quarter. Start at the Dohány Street Synagogue and its garden, where a metal willow is the Tree of Life, step into the Rumbach synagogue that Otto Wagner designed, stop at Dob utca 10 for Carl Lutz, the Swiss diplomat whose papers shielded Budapest’s Jews, pause in quiet at the ghetto wall, then pass the Kazinczy synagogue and the murals on the way to Klauzál tér and end at Szimpla Kert while it is still light. It is about 2 km from Astoria (M2), 25 to 30 minutes on foot and 2.5 to 3 hours with the visits; lunch on Kazinczy utca rounds it into a morning. Walk it on a Sunday, the only day the Rumbach opens until the end of 2026. On Saturdays both main synagogues are closed for Shabbat, so that day the walk stays outdoors.

The streets of District VII cost nothing. An adult Dohány ticket is 14,500 HUF (about $45); until 31 October the Dohány opens Sunday to Thursday 10:00 to 18:00 and Friday 10:00 to 16:00, last entry an hour before closing.

The Rumbach Street synagogue on Rumbach Sebestyén utca. Photo: A.Donaire2005, CC BY-SA 4.0, resized, via Wikimedia Commons

📋 At a Glance

📍 Start and finish	Dohány Street Synagogue, Dohány utca 2, by Astoria (M2)
🚶 Distance	About 2 km, 25 to 30 minutes of walking
⏱️ With the visits	2.5 to 3 hours
📅 Best day	Sunday: the Rumbach and the Dohány are open, the guided tour goes out
🚫 Closed	Dohány and Rumbach every Saturday, 1 November, 24 and 25 December
🎟️ Dohány ticket	14,500 HUF (about $45) adult, 5,500 HUF child aged 6 to 12
👔 Dress	Shoulders and knees covered; men cover their heads

The route, stop by stop

Stop	Where	On foot from the previous stop
1. Dohány Street Synagogue	Dohány utca 2	Start
2. Rumbach Street synagogue	Rumbach Sebestyén utca 11 to 13	About 4 minutes
3. Carl Lutz memorial	Dob utca 10	About 2 minutes
4. Gozsdu udvar	From Dob utca 16 through to Király utca 13	About 2 minutes, then 3 minutes through the passage
5. Ghetto wall memorial	Király utca 15, back courtyard	Next door
6. Kazinczy Street synagogue	Kazinczy utca 29 to 31	About 4 minutes
7. Murals on Dob utca and Kis Diófa utca	Dob utca 35, Kis Diófa utca 2	About 2 minutes
8. Klauzál tér	The square	About 2 minutes
9. Szimpla Kert	Kazinczy utca 14	About 4 minutes
10. Back to the Dohány	Astoria	About 4 minutes

The order is built around one rule: do the Dohány first. It is the only stop with a last-entry time, and once it is done the rest of the walk can run at whatever pace the day allows.

1. Dohány Street Synagogue, and the garden behind it

The largest synagogue in Europe is the anchor, and it gets its own guide: our Dohány Street Synagogue page has every ticket type, the holiday dates and the dress rules in full. For this walk you need three facts. An adult ticket is 14,500 HUF (about $45), a child aged 6 to 12 pays 5,500 HUF (about $17), and under-sixes go free. The ticket covers the synagogue, the Hungarian Jewish Museum, the ghetto exhibitions in the cellar, the Raoul Wallenberg Memorial Park and the graveyard, with a free guided tour included. And the last entry is an hour before the closing time on the door. Buying online gets you the fast lane at the gate.

Period	Sunday to Thursday	Friday	Saturday
Until 31 October	10:00 to 18:00, last entry 17:00	10:00 to 16:00, last entry 15:00	Closed
2 November to 31 December	10:00 to 16:00, last entry 15:00	10:00 to 14:00, last entry 13:00	Closed

Prices are in HUF, which is what you pay at the ticket office or in the operator’s online shop. Converted at 1 USD = 323 HUF, the ECB reference rate of 16 October 2026. Rates move, so treat the dollar figures as indicative.

Give the garden time. The metal willow in the memorial park is the Tree of Life, and the graveyard beside the Heroes’ Temple became a mass grave for those who died in the ghetto in the winter of 1944 to 1945.

2. The Rumbach Street synagogue, on a Sunday

Four minutes north, on Rumbach Sebestyén utca, stands the synagogue the Viennese architect Otto Wagner designed in the 1870s, with Byzantine and Moorish features. Its history is harder than its façade suggests: in 1941 the Hungarian authorities turned it into an internment camp for Jews without Hungarian citizenship, held there before deportation, and in 1944 it lay inside the ghetto. After decades of decay it reopened in 2021, and today it is a place of prayer, a concert hall and an exhibition space for the Jewish Museum and Archives.

Until the end of 2026 it opens on Sundays only: 10:00 to 18:00 in October, last entry 17:00, and 10:00 to 16:00 from November, last entry 15:00. It is closed on Sunday 1 November and on 24 and 25 December. The tickets are sold separately from the Dohány’s, in the same operator shop at jewishtourhungary.com, so check the current Rumbach price there before you go.

Combine it with the Dohány on the same Sunday morning and you have seen both halves of the story.

Look up on your way out. Rumbach Sebestyén utca doubles as an open-air gallery. The firewall at number 10 carries a portrait of Queen Elisabeth, Sisi, after whom Erzsébetváros is named, and the other side of the same house shows Hungary’s 6:3 win over England at Wembley in 1953 on 1,000 square meters of wall. At number 5, a 250 square meter Rubik’s Cube made of painted circles turns into a cube only from a distance, and into a 3D one through a phone camera.

3. The Carl Lutz memorial on Dob utca

Turn right onto Dob utca. At number 10, near one of the entrances to the former ghetto, stands the bronze by the sculptor Tamás Szabó in honor of Carl Lutz, the Swiss diplomat who headed his legation’s Foreign Interests Division in 1944 and whose protective letters and protected houses helped save tens of thousands of Budapest Jews.

A few steps back toward the corner, the firewall at Dob utca 4 shows Ángel Sanz Briz, the Spanish diplomat remembered as the “angel of Budapest”, who saved some 5,000 Hungarian Jews with Spanish papers. Two rescuers, a minute apart.

The Carl Lutz memorial on Dob utca. Photo: יעקב, CC0, resized, via Wikimedia Commons

4. Gozsdu udvar, by daylight

Enter Gozsdu udvar from Dob utca 16 and walk it through to Király utca 13. After dark this passage is one of the busiest addresses in the quarter; in the morning it is a quiet run of cafés, which is the version worth seeing on this walk. On the Király utca end, the firewall portrait of a Pakistani girl was painted for World Refugee Day.

5. The ghetto wall memorial at Király utca 15

Step out of Gozsdu onto Király utca and you are at number 15. In the back courtyard of this crumbling 1850s apartment house ran the wall of the Pest ghetto, the area sealed off in early December 1944, where close to 70,000 people were crammed into less than half a square kilometer until the Soviet army reached it on 18 January 1945. The last untouched stretch stood here until 2005, when the house behind it was demolished, and after protests at home and abroad a memorial wall was built on its line in 2010.

How to reach it. The memorial is approached from Király utca: walk through the house’s run-down forecourt and inner courtyard to the back.

This is a residential building. Go in small numbers, keep your voice low, and give the wall a few silent minutes. That is all it asks.

6. The Kazinczy Street synagogue

Walk east along Király utca and turn into Kazinczy utca, where the firewall at number 55 carries a painted treasure map of the neighborhood’s bars. The Orthodox community’s synagogue at numbers 29 to 31 was consecrated on 29 September 1913, to plans by the brothers Béla and Sándor Samu Löffler. Next to the richly decorated interior the street front is restrained, and its main decorative line, along the top, is a verse from Genesis: “How awesome is this place! This is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven.”

Inside, the community describes Hungarian Art Nouveau wall painting, Transylvanian motifs carved into the pews and the bimah, Zsolnay inlays on the columns of the eastern wall, and over a thousand seats. It is a working Orthodox synagogue first. The sure way inside is the operator’s Sunday Jewish Quarter tour (see the guided version below), which includes Kazinczy entry; to visit on your own, contact the Orthodox community before you go. The community also runs Hanna, a kosher restaurant, and our kosher food guide covers it with the rest of the quarter’s certified kitchens.

The Kazinczy Street synagogue on Kazinczy utca. Photo: A.Donaire2005, CC BY-SA 4.0, resized, via Wikimedia Commons

7. Murals on Dob utca and Kis Diófa utca

Around the corner, the firewall at Dob utca 35 is City Forests, 500 square meters painted with an air-purifying paint that makes the wall work a little like a tree. A block north, on the firewall of Kis Diófa utca 2, the Színes Város group painted a large mural for the 200th anniversary of the novelist Mór Jókai, the winning design of an open competition for young artists.

8. Klauzál tér

The quarter’s main square looks like any Budapest square on a weekday: a playground, benches, people walking dogs. In the winter of 1944 it was part of the ghetto, and it became a mass grave for those who died inside. Nothing on the square demands that you know this, which is exactly why it is worth knowing. On one of the houses facing the square, a painted greengrocer’s shop is realistic enough to make you reach for the door handle.

9. Szimpla Kert in daylight

Finish on Kazinczy utca at Szimpla Kert, the ruin bar every visitor has heard of, in the hours when you can actually see it. It opens at noon, and at 8:00 on Sundays. In daylight the courtyard and the rooms are there to look at rather than to push past, and the place is far easier to take in than at midnight.

Szimpla is also known for a Sunday-morning farmers’ market in its courtyard. Check szimpla.hu for whether and when it runs before you plan around it. Our Szimpla Kert guide covers the bar and its rules in full, and if one ruin bar leaves you curious, our ruin bar list has the rest of the street.

From Szimpla, Kazinczy utca runs straight back down to Dohány utca and the synagogue where you started.

Saturday, Shabbat and the days that change the walk

Saturday: the Dohány and the Rumbach are closed all day, every week. The walk still works as a street walk, the memorials, Gozsdu, the murals and Klauzál tér are all outdoors, but you will see the synagogues from the pavement.

Friday: the Dohány closes at 16:00 until the end of October and at 14:00 from November, last entry an hour earlier. Start in the morning.

Holidays in what is left of 2026: both synagogues are closed on Sunday 1 November and on 24 and 25 December. Between 27 December and 6 January the operator plans extended hours, with details still to be announced on its opening hours page.

Open Sundays left at the Rumbach in 2026: 18 and 25 October; 8, 15, 22 and 29 November; 6, 13, 20 and 27 December.

A guided version, if you want one

If you would rather walk it with a guide and see the Kazinczy’s interior, the operator’s Official Jewish Quarter Tour covers almost exactly this ground in 90 minutes: Dohány, Kazinczy, Gozsdu udvar, Madách tér, Rumbach and back. It runs every Sunday at 10:30 and 13:00, in English, starts at the Dohány entrance, includes admission to the Dohány complex with the Heroes’ Temple, the Rumbach and the Kazinczy, and has limited places. It does not run on Sundays when the synagogue is closed. Tickets are sold online and at the Dohány ticket office; check the current price in the operator’s shop. Our free vs paid walking tour guide explains how the tip-based tours handle the same streets.

Before and after the walk

The other memorial most people pair with this walk is by the river: the Shoes on the Danube Bank on the Pest embankment, where Jews were shot into the Danube in the winter of 1944 to 1945. And if you are choosing where to sleep, our District VII hotel guide explains which of these streets are quiet at night and which are not.

Source: Dohány and Rumbach opening hours, holiday closures and last-entry rules from the operator’s opening hours page; Dohány ticket prices from the operator’s ticket shop; dress code, security, bags and what the ticket covers from its visitor information; the Jewish Quarter tour’s length, days, route and inclusions from its tour page; the Rumbach’s history from rumbachzsinagoga.hu; the Kazinczy synagogue and the community-run Hanna restaurant from the Budapest Orthodox community at maoih.hu; the Carl Lutz memorial from the Swiss Federal Department of Foreign Affairs at eda.admin.ch; the ghetto’s history, the memorial wall and the access from Király utca from the Haver Foundation at zsidosag.haver.hu; Gozsdu udvar’s address from gozsduudvar.hu; the murals from budapestinfo.hu and the Jókai mural from szinesvaros.hu; Szimpla Kert’s opening hours from its safety plan on szimpla.hu. All read on 17 October 2026. Walking times are our estimate from map distances. USD at 1 USD = 323 HUF, the ECB reference rate of 16 October 2026.