A street in Rákospalota
Régi Fóti út in Rákospalota, Budapest, carries the Rákospalota Synagogue, built in 1926–1927 and reopened on 17 September 2026 after serving decades as a library warehouse following the Holocaust. The same ground held a Late Roman and Avar-era cemetery, church, and village, uncovered by excavations completed in December 1966.
A synagogue rose, emptied, and reopened on this road
On this same street, about half a mile from here, stands the Rákospalota Synagogue. Jewish families in Rákospalota built it between 1926 and 1927, after their community split off from Újpest's congregation in 1902. Its first rabbi, Yitzchak Michael Dushinsky, led it for 41 years, until he died in 1939.
The Nazis and their Hungarian allies murdered the Jews of Rákospalota during World War II. The synagogue emptied out. Hungary's state library later used the building as a warehouse, storing old maps and then library stock, from the 1960s into the 1980s.
The synagogue sat empty for decades. Then, in 2026, it reopened for prayer, rededicated after nearly a century of use, loss, and storage.
Yitzchak Michael Dushinsky had led the congregation since 1898, back when it still belonged to Újpest. The Jews of Rákospalota, in Budapest, were rounded up and murdered by the Nazis and their Hungarian collaborators during World War II. The community that had raised the synagogue, pooling money through a small 44-page fundraising book in 1926, did not survive to see the building again.
The empty building became a warehouse. First it held maps, stacked where the ark once stood. In the mid-1980s, the National Széchényi Library bought it and kept using it for storage.
On September 17, 2026, the synagogue reopened. After a year of renovation, it held a Torah dedication, with a choir of cantors from Jerusalem performing at the ceremony. It is a working synagogue again, Jewish life returning to Régi Fóti út after eighty years of silence.
Underneath this same stretch of street, archaeologists found something far older. Digging near the Rákospalota gas station ended in December 1966, uncovering a cemetery, a church, and a village on this ground. The graves and foundations date to the Late Roman period and the Avar era, centuries before anyone built a road here at all. People were burying their dead on this patch of Rákospalota long before it had a name, let alone a synagogue.
Régi Fóti út carries both histories under it: an ancient cemetery beneath the asphalt, and a synagogue, half a mile off, open again after eighty years.
Every person, building and event in this story opens into its own dig in the app — and Strata will dig the ground under your feet instead, wherever that is, in about a minute, with every source shown.