The Simon Wiesenthal Centre applauded and endorsed the decision by Mazsihisz - the representative body of Hungarian Jewry to stay away from this year’s government-sponsored commemoration of the 70th anniversary of the Holocaust in Hungary.
The Hungarian Jewish group took the decision to boycott all government events unless the government cancels some of the planned memorials. The dispute stems from historical and ideological differences between the Federation and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s government about the yearlong series of remembrances centered on the 1944 deportation of more than 430,000 Hungarian Jews to Nazi death camps.
“The known plans do not take into account the arguments or the sensitivity of the victims of the horrors of the Holocaust,” the group said, adding that there had been “no substantive progress on the government side in the dispute over the Hungarian Holocaust Memorial Year.”
Mazsihisz wants the government to abandon plans to build a memorial of Nazi Germany’s 1944 invasion of Hungary and a project dedicated to the child victims of the Holocaust. The “House of Fates” memorial is being built at a Budapest railway station from which Jews were deported to Nazi death camps.
The memorial honoring children will include an exhibit and education center, and Mazsihisz said it has been sidelined from the project, whose “historical approach remains unknown” to the federation’s experts. Mazsihisz fears both memorials will downplay the role of Hungary and Hungarians in the Holocaust.
The group is also demanding the dismissal of Sandor Szakaly, a historian appointed by the government to lead a new historical research institute, because of disputed remarks he made about the 1941 deportation to Ukraine of Jews from other Eastern European countries who had sought refuge in Hungary. Some 15,000 of them were killed by Ukrainian militias and German SS troops.
Mazsihisz and leaders of other Hungarian Jewish organizations met with government officials on Thursday, and Prime Minister Orban is expected address their concerns next week.
In a letter to Orban, the Simon Wiesenthal Centre's Director for International Relations, Dr. Shimon Samuels advised the Prime Minister that "the wonderful idea for a "House of Fates" (based on the Imre Kertesz Nobel Prize - winning book 'Fatelessness') and the announced theme focusing on "the Children's Holocaust" would seem to be a figleaf for international opinion, while the Holocaust itself and contemporary anti-Semitism are left as a function of domestic politics and political mortgages with the extreme right".
He noted the growing influence of Jobbik, the third largest party in the Hungarian Parliament and present in the European Parliament. ‘’Its increasingly blatant antisemitism and Gypsophobia are encouraged by uncontested rallies bearing unadulterated swastikas, the latest planned for a synagogue venue,’’ Samuels said.
The extreme-right and anti-Semitic party plans to hold next Friday its political assembly in a building that used to be a synagogue in the city of Esztergom.
The entire Jewish community in this city located 46 km (29 miles) north of Budapest, was killed during the Holocaust. The synagogue today is operated by the local government as a cultural center.
The rally is part ofJobbik’s campaign ahead of elections in April. The party’s platform is laced with anti-Semitism and anti-Roma policy.