One of the most unusual cemeteries in Hungary, the Salgótarjáni Street Jewish Cemetery was established in 1874, in the neighbourhood of the public cemetery of Budapest at the time, today the Fiumei Road Cemetery. Until 1892 this was the only functioning Jewish cemetery in Pest. The relatively small area, 4.8 hectares, was full by the turn of the century. Most of the mausoleums built as the final resting place for the Jewish elite of Pest city were designed by Sándor Fellner and Zsigmond Quittner. The tombs decorated with Jewish symbols and Hungarian folk motifs, the ceremonial and gate buildings are the work of Béla Lajta, genius of the Hungarian Art Nouveau.

After the siege of Budapest, the majority of the dead from the Budapest Ghetto were buried here. However, the cemetery was barely used after 1950; the last funeral was held in the years after the turn of the Millennium. The apparently unstoppable decay of the cemetery started in the 1960s. Vegetation overgrown the gravestones, the mausoleums were damaged and plundered, the cupola of the ceremonial building collapsed in the 1980s. In 2002, the whole cemetery was declared protected monument. In 2016 the cemetery was put under the administration of the National Heritage Institute.