The Emanuel Tree stands in the rear courtyard of the Dohány Street Synagogue, a silver weeping willow with thousands of metal leaves bearing the names of Holocaust victims.

Sculptor Imre Varga created it in 1991, but its origin story belongs to Hollywood. Tony Curtis, born Bernard Schwartz to Hungarian Jewish immigrants, funded the memorial through the Emanuel Foundation, named for his father, a tailor from the small town of Mátészalka.

The elder Schwartz had fled Hungary's White Terror in the early 1920s. Decades later, his famous son returned to find his father's synagogue crumbling and ordered this monument built on the spot.

The tree rises above mass graves where over two thousand people who died in the Budapest Ghetto during the winter of 1944 to 1945 are buried. Before it stands a black stone tablet, its commandments symbolically erased.

VoiceMap's self-guided audio tours trace the Hungarian roots of American icons here, revealing how Curtis and Estée Lauder, whose mother was also a Hungarian Jew, helped restore the synagogue complex and preserve its memory.