Dohány Street Synagogue: Closed on Saturdays, and the Last Ticket Goes an Hour Early

The Dohány Street Synagogue is the largest synagogue in Europe, a short walk from Astoria on metro line M2, and one of the few Budapest sights that can turn you away three different ways: on a Saturday, in shorts, or at 19:01 on a summer evening when the door says 20:00. Get those three right and the rest is easy.

Photo: Zairon, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

The hour before closing

This is the one that catches people. Entry and the ticket office close one hour before the closing time on the sign. The gate does not care that you can still see visitors inside. If the board says 20:00, the last person in walks through at 19:00.

In practice that means:

Period	Sunday to Thursday	Friday	Last entry, Sun to Thu	Last entry, Friday
until 30 September	10:00 to 20:00	10:00 to 16:00	19:00	15:00
1 to 31 October	10:00 to 18:00	10:00 to 16:00	17:00	15:00
2 November to 31 December	10:00 to 16:00	10:00 to 14:00	15:00	13:00

Saturday is closed all year. If the synagogue is the fixed point of your day, put it in the morning and let everything else move around it.

Saturdays and the Jewish holidays

The complex is closed every Saturday, and it closes for the Jewish holidays too. A Saturday in the Jewish Quarter means seeing the synagogue from the street.

The closures left in 2026:

Date	What happens
26 and 27 September	Closed
2 October	Closes at 14:00
3 and 4 October	Closed
1 November	Closed
24 and 25 December	Closed

The operator reserves the right to change hours at short notice, and 2027 dates are not out yet. If your only free day falls near a holiday, check the operator’s opening-hours page the week you travel.

Tickets: what they cost and where to buy

Ticket	Price
Adult	14,500 Ft (about $45)
Student with an ISIC card	12,000 Ft (about $37)
Child aged 6 to 12	5,500 Ft (about $17)
Family: 2 adults and at least 2 children aged 6 to 12	33,000 Ft (about $102)
Under 6	Free

Prices in HUF, which is what the ticket costs. Converted at 1 USD = 322 HUF, the ECB reference rate of 24 September 2026. Rates move, so treat the dollar figures as a guide.

Tickets are non-refundable, good for a single entry, and valid for 90 days from purchase, so you can buy before you know which day you will go.

Plain entry costs the same wherever you buy it. The visitor side of the complex is run by Jewish Tour Hungary, the tourism office of the Federation of Hungarian Jewish Communities (MAZSIHISZ), which sells tickets in its own shop at jewishtourhungary.com, and the big resale sites sell the same fast-track entry for the same money. Buying online, either way, gets you the fast lane at the gate. Two things are worth knowing before you click. Every ticket already includes the 45-minute guided tour, so there is no reason to pay extra for a “with guide” version of the plain ticket. And the dearer listings, two to four hours long, are walking tours of the Jewish Quarter that take in the synagogue along the way: a different product, not a better ticket. The operator runs its own Jewish Quarter tours too, sold separately.

You can also buy at the ticket office on the spot, until the hour-before-closing cut-off.

What the ticket gets you

More than the sanctuary, and the rest is the part people remember.

• The Great Synagogue itself. Consecrated on 6 September 1859, designed by Ludwig Förster, a German architect who taught at the Vienna Academy, with the inner sanctum by Frigyes Feszl, the architect of the Pest Vigadó. The twin towers are 44 meters high. It seats nearly 3,000: 1,497 men downstairs and 1,472 women in the galleries. It is a Neolog synagogue and it still holds services.
• The Hungarian Jewish Museum, in the wing at Wesselényi utca 7, with its permanent exhibition and a free audio guide in several languages at the desk. The ghetto exhibitions are in the cellar.
• The Raoul Wallenberg Memorial Park, with the Tree of Life, the Emmanuel memorial tree conceived by Tony Curtis and made by the sculptor Imre Varga, and plaques to the people who rescued Jews during the Holocaust.
• The graveyard. Jewish custom does not usually put a cemetery next to a synagogue. This one exists because it had to: Dohány utca was the edge of the ghetto, and when the ghetto was liberated on 18 January 1945 the dead lay in the streets. They were buried in 24 common graves in the synagogue’s yard, 1,140 of them known by name and 1,170 unknown.
• The Lapidarium behind the synagogue, where the old gravestones are kept.

Next to all this, in the arcade, stands the Heroes’ Temple, built in 1931 to László Vágó’s design for the 10,000 Hungarian Jewish soldiers of the First World War. It seats 186 and is used for prayer.

The tour is the best part of the ticket. It runs every 30 to 60 minutes, lasts 45 minutes, goes ahead even with one visitor, and covers the sanctuary, the grave garden and the memorial park. Languages: English, Hebrew, Spanish, French, Italian, German, Russian and Hungarian; you find your language’s flag inside the synagogue. The guides are patient with questions and strong on the history, and the garden, with the graves and the memorial, is where the visit comes together. Recording the guide, audio or video, is not allowed.

Give the whole complex at least an hour, more with the museum. Ten minutes in the sanctuary is the version of this visit that feels expensive.

Dress, security and bags

• Shoulders and knees covered. Sleeveless tops, short skirts and shorts are refused at the gate. The ticket inspectors sell cover-ups if you are caught out, but in summer it is simpler to carry a scarf.
• Men cover their heads. Wear your own hat or cap, or take the kippah handed out after the ticket check, and keep it on throughout the complex.
• Security check at the entrance. Metal objects and phones come out of your pockets.
• No backpacks bigger than hand luggage. Leave the day pack at the hotel.
• No food, drink or smoking anywhere on the grounds except the café.

Rumbach and Kazinczy: the other two synagogues

The Dohány is one of three great synagogues a few streets apart, and the other two tell different stories.

The Rumbach Street synagogue (Rumbach Sebestyén utca 11 to 13) was designed by Otto Wagner, the Viennese architect, and inaugurated in 1874. In 1941 the Hungarian authorities turned it into an internment camp for Jews without Hungarian citizenship, held there before deportation, and in 1944 it was inside the Pest ghetto. After decades of decay it was restored and reopened in 2021, and today it is a place of worship, a concert and exhibition space for the Jewish Museum and Archives, and home to a kosher café. It is a separate ticket from the same operator, and its hours change on 3 October:

Period	Opening hours
until 2 October	Sunday to Thursday 10:00 to 18:00, Friday 10:00 to 16:00
3 to 31 October	Sunday only, 10:00 to 18:00
2 November to 31 December	Sunday only, 10:00 to 16:00

Last entry is an hour before closing here too, and it shares the Dohány’s holiday closures.

The Kazinczy Street synagogue (Kazinczy utca 29 to 31) belongs to Budapest’s Orthodox community and is the youngest of the three, consecrated on 29 September 1913 to the plans of the Löffler brothers, Béla and Sándor Samu. The street front is plain, with a verse from Genesis along the top. Inside it is Hungarian Art Nouveau: painted walls, Transylvanian motifs carved into the pews, Zsolnay inlays on the columns of the eastern wall, and over a thousand seats. It is a working Orthodox synagogue first, and the community’s own restaurant, Hanna, is in the same complex. Our kosher food guide covers it and the rest of Kazinczy utca.

Before and after

The synagogue sits at the Astoria end of District VII, on the edge of the old Jewish Quarter. If you are staying nearby, our District VII accommodation guide explains why the blocks around the synagogue are the quiet ones and Kazinczy utca is not.

The other memorial most visitors pair with this one is by the river on the Pest embankment: the Shoes on the Danube Bank, where Jews were shot into the Danube in the winter of 1944.

Sources, all read 25 September 2026: opening hours, holiday closures and last-entry rules for the Dohány and Rumbach synagogues from the operator’s opening-hours page; ticket types, prices, validity and refunds from the operator’s ticket shop, linked from jewishtourhungary.com; dress, security, bag rules, fast lane and what the ticket covers from its visitor information; the guided tour from its free tour page; building history, the Heroes’ Temple, the museum, the graveyard, the Tree of Life and Rumbach from its about page; the Kazinczy Street synagogue from the Budapest Orthodox community at maoih.hu. USD conversion at 1 USD = 322 HUF, the ECB reference rate of 24 September 2026.