Grand Tour pg. 14

The chamber meeting room...	...from different angles
The device on the window sill in the next photo is a cigar holder where members placed their burning cigars while in session.	The length of the ashes when they came out to retrieve them revealed how long they had met.
The figures carved on the posts in the chambers represented the common man.	They were a reminder to the representatives of the population they served.
We return to the same Restaurant we had been 3 years ago...	...and toast our good fortune to have returned
The Restaurant is across the street from The Hungarian State Opera House	This time we take a tour






The mirror in the next picture was installed so the King could see himself and those behind him when he walked up the stairs of his private entrance to The Opera.	Therefore, he didn't have to turn around--which would have been most unkingly....
We begin our tour of the once heavily populated Jewish section of Budapest at the Dohany Street Synagogue. It is the largest in Europe and one of the largest working synagogues in the world	It was badly damaged and desecrated during WWII. The Nazis used it as a stable. Its restoration was completed in 1998 through state and private contributions. including $5,000,000 from Hungarian Estee Lauder. It now services a much diminished Jewish population and a huge number of tourists


This sculpture in the next photo is in the rear courtyard of the Synagogue, called The Raoul Wallenberg Memory Park. Shaped like a weeping willow tree with eight branches, each of the leaves on the tree bears the name of one of the 400,000 Hungarian Jews who perished.	The number eight is symbolic, as that is the same number of candles on a menorah. But this one is upside down, a rebuke to those devastating, hopeless years. The black stone rising from the center of the tree has two empty spaces carved into it, where the Ten Commandments would ordinarily fit. This moving memorial to those lost in World War II evokes the abandonment of the Jews by their countrymen and their God.
Rumbach Street Synagogue, with photos from lost Hungarian families	The theme of the Exhibit is "Where are they now?"
Two more memorials to honor the Swiss Consul, Carl Lutz, who rescued 1,000's of Jews

One Museum we visited but did not photograph was The House of Terror. It was a gut wrenching documentation of what happened to the Hungarians who managed to survive the horrors of The War only to suffer and/or die at the hands of the Russians who overtook their country.

Grand Tour pg.15