Behind Budapest’s Great Synagogue on Dohány Street, in the small courtyard known as the Raoul Wallenberg Holocaust Memorial Park, a simple black marble plaque set into the ground honors rescuers who acted during the destruction of Hungarian Jewry. Surrounded by a mound of pebbles, the memorial invites a distinctly Jewish gesture of remembrance: visitors add a stone, a quiet sign that a name has been visited and carried forward.

The plaque is commonly described as the “Righteous Among the Nations” memorial, referencing the Israeli honorific for non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust. Its gold-lettered names recall a wartime network of protection in Budapest, when neutral diplomats and other rescuers issued protective papers, intervened with authorities, and helped establish safe houses for Jews under threat of deportation, forced labor, and murder.

Among the names engraved are internationally known rescuers such as Raoul Wallenberg, Carl Lutz, Ángel Sanz Briz, and others. The memorial also includes the Portuguese diplomat Alberto Carlos de Liz-Teixeira Branquinho, who served as Portugal’s chargé d’affaires in Budapest in 1944, and whose name is recorded in this Wallenberg memorial context. Carlos Sampaio Garrido, Portugal’s minister in Hungary, is also commemorated here, his name added to the plaque later, reflecting the growing public recognition of Portuguese rescue actions in Budapest.

This ground-level memorial gains additional meaning from its immediate surroundings. A few steps away stands Imre Varga’s Holocaust “Tree of Life” (also known as the Emanuel Tree), a weeping-willow sculpture whose metal leaves bear victims’ names, making the park a layered site of memory: a place that mourns the murdered while also marking those who chose to help.

This tomb marks the final resting place of Monsignor Joaquim Carreira, a Portuguese Catholic priest remembered for having sheltered Jews and other persecuted people in Rome during the Second World War. Although his decisive actions took place far from Portugal, in the heart of wartime Italy, his grave in Soutos-Caranguejeira has become a tangible memorial point, linking a small parish in central Portugal to one of Europe’s darkest chapters and to the history of rescue.

Born in 1908 in the Caranguejeira area, Carreira was ordained in 1931 and, in 1940, was sent to Rome, where he served as vice-rector and later rector of the Pontifical Portuguese College (1940–1954). When the German occupation of Rome began in September 1943, the city entered a period of raids, denunciations, and mass arrests. It was in this climate that Carreira offered refuge within the College and helped protect those targeted by Nazi and Fascist persecution, including members of the Jewish-Italian Cittone family. In an official report concerning the 1943–1944 academic year, he recorded the moral core of his decision: he had offered “asylum and hospitality” to people pursued under “unjust and inhuman laws.”

Testimonies and journalistic research indicate that he assisted dozens of individuals, with accounts commonly placing the number of those sheltered and supported at around 40 to 50 people during 1943–1944, including Jews. Some sources also note that his help extended beyond hiding and protection in Rome, involving support for escape routes and preparations for travel via Portugal, with Lisbon appearing as a crucial gateway on the way to safer destinations.

Carreira died in Rome on 7 December 1981. He was initially buried there, but in 2001 his remains were transferred to the cemetery of Soutos-Caranguejeira, returning him to his native land. In April 2015, in Lisbon, his family received the medal and certificate associated with the title “Righteous Among the Nations,” and later that year a commemorative plaque bearing the Yad Vashem medal was placed on his grave in Caranguejeira. Today, the tomb functions as a quiet geographic anchor for a story of courage, discretion, and practical solidarity, a life lived in service to faith and to those who, at the time, had nowhere safe to go.

The Old New Synagogue, known in Yiddish as the Altneuschul, is the oldest preserved nucleus of Prague’s former Jewish quarter and is described as the oldest active synagogue in Europe. It was built in the last third of the thirteenth century, in early Gothic style, and for more than 700 years served as the main synagogue of Prague’s Jewish community.

One physical feature leaves a lasting impression on almost every visitor: the floor lies below street level. A commonly cited explanation links this to the verse from Psalm 130:1, “Out of the depths I cry to You,” an effect made even more pronounced as street levels rose over the centuries through repeated repaving.

The name itself reflects the urban history of the ghetto. When it was built, it was known as the New Shul or Great Shul, and only later, with the construction of other synagogues in the late sixteenth century, did it become known as the Old New. Local tradition also preserves a popular etymology connecting the name to the phrase al tenai, “on condition,” associated with a legend about stones brought from the Temple in Jerusalem.

This is also where the Maharal enters the story. Maharal is the sobriquet of Rabbi Yehuda Loew ben Bezalel, a major rabbinic figure in sixteenth-century Prague; the term is a Hebrew acronym for Moreinu ha Rav Loew, “our teacher, Rabbi Loew.” Local tradition identifies the place where he sat, near the Torah Ark, as a recognizable spot within the synagogue.

The building is further surrounded by legendary narratives that the site’s own documentation records as tradition, including the association of the attic with the remains of the Golem.

Practical visiting information

As of 1 January 2024, there is no separate ticket for the synagogue; the visit is included in the Jewish Town circuit.
As a rule, the circuit operates daily except on Saturdays and Jewish holidays; on Fridays, closing takes place about one hour before the start of Shabbat.

The Stephen Wise Free Synagogue was born as a public idea, almost a manifesto, before it became a building. In 1905, Rabbi Stephen Samuel Wise refused an invitation to assume the pulpit of Temple Emanu-El after learning that sermons would be reviewed in advance by lay leaders. His response was to create a synagogue where the pulpit would be free, and where religious and ethical debate would not be domesticated by committees.

By 1907, Wise was already conducting services at the Hudson Theater and also on the Lower East Side. The congregation was formally established on 15 April 1907 at the Hotel Savoy, with Henry Morgenthau Sr. as its first president. From that moment came the phrase that defined the project: the “Free Synagogue” would be democratic, without reserved seating and without membership dues, in other words, pewless and dueless.

What sets this synagogue apart in New York’s religious landscape is the institutional translation of the prophetic into community policy. In December 1907, it created a Social Service Department, described as the first of its kind within a synagogue, carrying out direct work on the Lower East Side. From the same matrix emerged Louise Wise Services, associated with the initiative of Louise Waterman Wise, focused on foster care and adoption, and on removing children from institutional abandonment.

The urban scale grew rapidly. In 1910, with more than 500 members, the Rosh Hashanah service was held at Carnegie Hall. In 1911, the community purchased brownstones on West 68th Street to establish a permanent base, and in 1922 Wise founded the Jewish Institute of Religion, which was installed next door on West 68th Street, reinforcing the area as a center for rabbinical training and liberal Jewish thought.

The current building, at number 30, belongs to a later phase. Construction began in 1940, was suspended in December 1941 for the duration of the Second World War, and resumed in 1947. The dedication of the new synagogue took place on 5 January 1950, after Wise’s death on 19 April 1949.

One symbolic object condenses the ambition of the project: a stone from the Western Wall, described in 1923 as intended to be incorporated into the walls of the new complex on West 68th Street. Donated to Wise by Sir Wyndham Deedes, it was also associated with the building that would house the Jewish Institute of Religion. It functioned simultaneously as religious statement, material memory, and political symbol of the sacred.

Today, the synagogue defines itself as Reform and maintains a public profile centered on musical liturgy and broad communal life. Its published schedule lists Shabbat services on Fridays at 6:00 pm and on Saturdays at 10:00 am.

Kehila Kedosha Janina, often abbreviated as KKJ, is one of the rarest and most living cases of Judaism on the Lower East Side: a Romaniote synagogue, linked to the Greek Jewish tradition and distinct from both the Ashkenazi and Sephardic worlds. The building itself, narrow and in a tenement-style format, was constructed in 1926–1927 for a community of Romaniote Jews originating from Ioannina, also known as Janina, in northwestern Greece.

The congregation was organized in New York in 1906, at a time when the neighborhood was dense with immigrant synagogues, almost all marked by different languages and rites. The impulse was clear: to preserve a specific liturgy and a communal culture developed in Greece over centuries. In 1927, the group opened its doors at the current address, consolidating on the city’s Jewish map a third, lesser-known identity strand, and for that reason all the more significant.

The building was designed by Sydney Daub and is immediately recognizable by the symbols on its facade: Stars of David, Tablets of the Law, and a cut-out arch suggesting an Orientalizing visual language, consistent with the Mediterranean origins of the community. It is also identified as the only surviving Romaniote synagogue in the Western Hemisphere with an active congregation.

Here the Torah is not a decorative detail, but memory carried in material form. KKJ preserves three Torah scrolls brought from Ioannina, and one of them, associated with the synagogue’s dedication in 1927, is described as housed in a heavy silver tik, a rigid case common in Mediterranean and Eastern traditions and distinct from the more widely known Ashkenazi imagery prevalent in New York.

Since 1997, the women’s gallery has housed a museum created to tell the story of the community and of Greek Judaism to an audience that, in most cases, had never heard of the Romaniotes. The space includes a library, gallery, and educational resources, and is described as containing the first Holocaust memorial in America dedicated to Greek Jews, as well as a community area on the lower floor inspired by a traditional Greek cafe.

Founded in 1845 by 37 German-speaking Jewish immigrants on the Lower East Side, Congregation Emanu-El began modestly, in a rented room near Grand and Clinton Streets, yet with a clear ambition: to create, in New York, a Reform Judaism with language, music, and pedagogy aligned with the modern world. It is regarded as the first Reform congregation in the city.

Its religious orientation took shape through concrete and, for the time, provocative choices: the gradual replacement of Hebrew by German and later English; the introduction of an organ and instrumental music into worship; the adoption of innovations in the celebration of certain festivals; and, most notably, the abandonment of the mechitza, eliminating the physical separation between men and women. From the perspective of cultural history, these choices help explain why Emanu-El became a laboratory for what the temple itself described as “Classical Reform”, today presented simply as Reform Judaism.

The congregation’s urban biography mirrors the social and geographic “uptown” movement of its community. In 1868, Emanu-El erected a major building at the intersection of Fifth Avenue and East 43rd Street, celebrated as a striking example of Moorish Revival architecture, designed by Leopold Eidlitz and Henry Fernbach. Decades later, real estate pressures and residential migration northward led the congregation to the Upper East Side. In 1926, consolidation with Temple Beth-El took place, and the new community acquired the site at Fifth Avenue and 65th Street, then associated with the former Astor family mansion.

The current building, at One East 65th Street, stands as an architectural manifesto of twentieth-century New York Reform Judaism. Completed in 1929, with the first services held that same year and formal dedication in January 1930, it was designed by Robert D. Kohn, Charles Butler, and Clarence Stein, in association with Mayers, Murray & Phillip. The design combines Byzantine and Romanesque forms with Moorish references and Art Deco details. Scale is part of the message: a sanctuary 100 feet wide, 175 feet long, and 103 feet high, with seating for approximately 2,500 people and no interior columns obstructing the view.

The interior was conceived as a visual text. The temple features more than 60 stained-glass windows, a large rose window rich in symbolism, including numerical and tribal references, and an ark designed as an open Sefer Torah housing seven Torah scrolls. The central role of music in Reform worship is underscored by the sanctuary organ, described as the largest synagogue organ in the world, with more than 10,000 pipes, as well as by the eight-story mosaic arch conceived by Hildreth Meière, where Jewish iconography meets Art Deco visual language.

Beyond worship, Emanu-El has established itself as a center for Jewish material culture. A key milestone was the opening of the Herbert & Eileen Bernard Museum of Judaica to the public in 1997, created to display and interpret a collection of ritual and ceremonial objects. The museum presents this collection as a window into the diversity of Jewish culture over time and offers both in-person visits and digital access via Bloomberg Connects.

For a “well-known name” that captures the synagogue’s place in American public history, the institution’s own chronology links Beth-El, which merged with Emanu-El, to Oscar S. Straus, identified as the first Jew to serve in a United States presidential cabinet, appointed by Theodore Roosevelt. Within the same milieu of civic and communal leadership appears Louis Marshall, associated with major Jewish leadership roles and with the founding of the American Jewish Committee in response to pogroms in Eastern Europe.

Inaugurated in 1872 at the corner of Lexington Avenue and East 55th Street, Central Synagogue is one of the major landmarks of Reform Judaism in New York City and a rare example of a monumental 19th-century synagogue still in continuous use in the city.

The building was commissioned by the Ahawath Chesed congregation, then numbering around 140 families, with the explicit ambition of creating a space capable of accommodating more than 1,400 worshippers. This figure alone speaks to a moment of strong communal confidence, public visibility, and social consolidation.

The design was by Henry Fernbach, identified by the synagogue itself as a prominent Jewish architect, and follows an interpretation of the model of the Dohány Street Synagogue in Budapest. Externally, the building is defined by its twin towers, a large rose window, and Moorish Revival arches. Internally, the sanctuary is organized as a basilica, with a high central nave, galleries, and slender cast-iron columns anchored into the bedrock, as well as an organ and extensive decorative work.

Central Synagogue emerged from a well-documented institutional genealogy. Shaar Hashomayim, founded in 1839, and Ahawath Chesed, founded in 1846, both originated on the Lower East Side and merged in 1898 to form Ahawath Chesed Shaar Hashomayim. In 1918, the congregation adopted the name Central Synagogue.

One material detail often surprises visitors. In the Aron Hakodesh of the main sanctuary there is a Torah scroll with its own documented biography, known as the Holocaust Scroll. It is one of 1,564 scrolls rescued from Jewish communities in Bohemia, Moravia, and Silesia, collected in Prague after the Second World War, transferred in 1964 to Westminster Synagogue in London, and redistributed to living communities. Central Synagogue received its scroll in 1967. It was written in the early 19th century and is associated with the community of Lipnik, today in the Czech Republic, identified as number 866 by the Memorial Scrolls Trust.

The recent history of the building is marked by a decisive event. On August 28, 1998, during renovation works, a devastating fire destroyed much of the interior, including the choir and the organ. The Aron was preserved because it was under a separate protective structure, and most ritual objects, including the Torah scrolls, had already been removed due to the ongoing works. The synagogue was reconsecrated and reopened on September 9, 2001, following restoration.

From a heritage perspective, the building was designated a New York City landmark in 1966 and a National Historic Landmark in 1975, recognizing its architectural and historical significance for New York City and for American Jewish history.

Congregation Shearith Israel, known as the Spanish & Portuguese Synagogue, traces its origins directly to the first organized Jewish settlement in New Amsterdam (New York). According to the congregation itself, the founding core consisted of 23 Jews, largely of Iberian origin, who arrived from Recife in Dutch Brazil, displaced by the Portuguese reconquest and the return of the Inquisition. After initial resistance from local authorities, the community obtained permission to remain in 1655, received a Sefer Torah sent from Amsterdam that same year, and secured land for a cemetery in 1656, thereby establishing the basic structures of Jewish communal life in the New World.

During the colonial period, religious practice was conducted discreetly, yet the congregation left clear documentary traces. By 1695 there is reference to a synagogue on Beaver Street, and around 1700 worship was held in a house on Mill Street. In 1730, Shearith Israel consecrated the first purpose-built synagogue in continental North America, located on Mill Street, today South William Street. Over the centuries, as the city expanded and residential life shifted uptown, the congregation occupied successive buildings, while preserving objects and liturgical forms that materialize the continuity of its minhag.

The current building, associated with the address 2 West 70th Street, was constructed in 1896-1897 from a design by the firm Brunner & Tryon and became a landmark example of monumental neoclassical architecture applied to religious buildings at the turn of the century. The New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission describes the principal facade facing Central Park West as composed of four large engaged Composite columns framing arched openings with bronze gates, creating a loggia-like effect, together with a classical composition featuring entablature and attic. The building was designated a New York City Landmark on March 19, 1974.

A relevant detail in reading the building is its dual addressing. Despite the ceremonial presence of the Central Park West frontage, daily practice privileges the more discreet entrance on 70th Street, at 2 West 70th Street, partly to avoid interference with the flow of services near the hehal, the ark. The congregation’s own guide explains this choice and also notes the existence of a Large Synagogue and a Small Synagogue for different uses throughout the calendar.

The statue of Francisco Sanches, installed in 1954 in Largo de São João do Souto, was designed by the sculptor Salvador Barata Feyo and placed directly opposite the church where Sanches was baptized in 1551. That location is not incidental. It anchors the monument to the most concrete documented point in his early life and ties Braga’s urban memory to a figure born into a family of New Christian origin.

Francisco Sanches became one of the most important physicians and philosophers of the Iberian Renaissance. His best-known work, Quod nihil scitur (1581), challenged scholastic certainty and helped secure his place in the history of European skepticism. He later built his career mainly in France, especially in Toulouse, where he taught and practiced medicine.

The monument therefore does more than commemorate a local intellectual. It marks, in public space, the memory of a thinker whose life was shaped by the difficult world of families of Jewish descent in early modern Iberia, and whose work reached far beyond Braga. In this case, the statue connects the city not only to Jewish memory, but also to the wider histories of medicine, philosophy, and critical thought.

Set beside the busy artery of Avenida Almirante Reis, near the Metro stop Anjos, a discreet plaque at Largo de Santa Bárbara anchors one of Lisbon’s most consequential connections to the history of the Holocaust. The memorial honours Carlos Sampaio Garrido (1883–1960), the Portuguese diplomat who served in Hungary during the war years and is widely credited with helping to save around a thousand Hungarian Jews in 1944, at a moment when deportations and persecution accelerated with brutal speed.

The plaque’s location is not incidental. It stands in the immediate orbit of Rua dos Anjos 79, the headquarters of the Lisbon Regional Council of the Portuguese Bar Association (Ordem dos Advogados), a venue that hosted public commemorations connected to International Holocaust Remembrance Day. In January 2012, these initiatives combined an exhibition, public talks, and the unveiling of this very memorial, weaving together civic space, institutional memory, and the ethical questions raised by rescue, neutrality, and individual responsibility under dictatorship and occupation.

What the monument is

The monument takes the form of a commemorative plaque with a direct, didactic inscription. It identifies Sampaio Garrido as Portugal’s ambassador in Budapest (1939–44), explicitly links him to the title “Righteous Among the Nations,” and frames the tribute as recognition “for saving from death Jews persecuted during the Holocaust.” It is dated to Lisbon, 27 January 2012, marking International Holocaust Remembrance Day, and includes institutional references associated with Holocaust education and remembrance in Portugal.

This is a memorial designed less for ceremony than for encounter. It is not monumental in scale, but it is unambiguous in message: the city’s streets can also be archives, and a life of moral risk can be made legible in public space without spectacle.

Historical context

Carlos Sampaio Garrido was Portugal’s representative in Hungary during the period when Nazi policy, local collaboration, and wartime chaos converged into mass persecution. In early April 1944, as anti-Jewish measures intensified, he warned Lisbon through diplomatic channels about the degrading and predatory nature of the decrees being imposed on Hungarian Jews. Soon after, amid wartime disruptions and the relocation of some diplomatic missions, he moved the Portuguese legation’s operations and his residence outside Budapest and sheltered a group of Hungarian citizens, most of them Jewish, seeking to protect them from imminent danger.

On 28 April 1944, Hungarian political police raided the ambassador’s residence at dawn. According to testimony cited by Yad Vashem, Garrido physically tried to block the removal of one of the people under his protection, insisting on the inviolability of diplomatic premises. Despite his efforts, the raid proceeded and his “guests” were taken back to Budapest. He continued to press for their release, filed formal complaints, and demanded accountability. In the aftermath, Hungarian authorities declared him persona non grata, and only then did he inform Lisbon of the identities of those he had sheltered.

The scale of rescue associated with Portuguese action in Budapest during 1944 is often discussed as collective and contingent, involving Garrido and other diplomats and officials operating under severe constraints. A Portuguese official publication summarizing these efforts states that the combined action of Sampaio Garrido, Alberto Teixeira Branquinho, and Jules Gulden, with some degree of coverage from the Portuguese government, saved about a thousand Jews.

Recognition and memory in Lisbon

In 2010, Yad Vashem recognized Carlos Sampaio Garrido as Righteous Among the Nations, a designation reserved for non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust without expectation of reward.

Two years later, in January 2012, Lisbon’s local institutions translated that recognition into a public memorial. The Lisbon Regional Council of the Portuguese Bar Association partnered with the local parish authority (at the time, Junta de Freguesia dos Anjos) in a program of events that included the exhibition Vidas Poupadas: A Acção de Três Diplomatas Portugueses na II Guerra Mundial at Rua dos Anjos 79, followed by the unveiling of a plaque in his honour at Largo de Santa Bárbara.

The same commemorative cycle brought together diplomats, elected officials, and civil society figures connected to Holocaust memory in Portugal, indicating how Sampaio Garrido’s story moved from archival and family recollection into a shared public narrative.

Why this place matters in a Jewish heritage itinerary

Lisbon is often remembered as a wartime transit city, but this memorial points to another dimension of the city’s relationship to Jewish history: the diplomatic and bureaucratic channels through which lives could be protected or abandoned. The plaque at Largo de Santa Bárbara condenses that moral geography into a single point. It is a marker of a Portuguese presence inside the Holocaust’s European epicentre, and a reminder that, even within restrictive political systems, individual decisions could open narrow corridors of survival.

In the context of Jewish heritage, this is not a site of medieval continuity or synagogue architecture. It is a site of twentieth-century ethical memory, where the language of civic honour meets the history of rescue, persecution, and the afterlives of testimony.