Hungary Jews Reject State Money for Holocaust Anniversary Events
Several Jewish organizations in Hungary as a form of protest will not accept government grants for memorial events marking the 70th anniversary of the Holocaust.
The groups are protesting what they consider the state’s whitewashing of Hungary’s role in the Holocaust.
The organizations turning down the grants from the Civil Fund include the Frankel Leo synagogue in Budapest, the Budapest Jewish Summer Festival and the Jewish community in Nove Zamky, which is located over the border in Slovakia.
In a statement released Wednesday, the Frankel Synagogue Foundation said it decided to reject the funds to “draw attention” to several instances of what it called the state’s distortion of Holocaust history and the role of the regime of Miklos Horthy, who led Hungary into World War II as an ally of Nazi Germany.
The incidents, the synagogue statement said, “are incompatible with granting support for memorial events that pay tribute to the victims of mass murders or an honorable way of thinking.”
The synagogue, which is popular with young families, will hold memorial events, but does not “wish to use support from a government that displays turncoat behavior, arousing the indignation of the majority of Hungary’s Jewish community as well as the democratic international community.”
Hungary has named 2014 as Holocaust Memorial Year, marking the 70th anniversary of mass deportations of some 450,000 Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz. As part of the observances, the Civil Fund issued monetary grants to about 400 projects linked to commemoration, Jewish heritage or Jewish life.
In declining the grant, the president of the Nove Zamky Jewish community, Tomas Lang, wrote to the Civil Fund that while some Hungarian leaders, including Deputy Prime Minister Tibor Navracsics, had recognized Hungarian responsibility in the Holocaust when speaking in international forums, “the direction of official statements and actions belies their words.”
Lang also wrote last week, “We cannot lend our names to the falsification of history and the whitewashing of the Horthy regime.”
A number of Jewish organizations are meeting with government representatives on Thursday. On Sunday, a special assembly of Hungarian Jewish communities will decide whether to stage a general boycott of state-sponsored events.
Read more: http://www.jta.org/2014/02/05/news-opinion/world/jewish-groups-rejecting-hungarys-grants-for-holocaust-events#ixzz2sTp82qBS
This is a moment of great uncertainty. Here’s what you can do about it.
We hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, we’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s independent Jewish news this Passover. All donations are being matched by the Forward Board - up to $100,000.
This is a moment of great uncertainty for the news media, for the Jewish people, and for our sacred democracy. It is a time of confusion and declining trust in public institutions. An era in which we need humans to report facts, conduct investigations that hold power to account, tell stories that matter and share honest discourse on all that divides us.
With no paywall or subscriptions, the Forward is entirely supported by readers like you. Every dollar you give this Passover is invested in the future of the Forward — and telling the American Jewish story fully and fairly.
The Forward doesn’t rely on funding from institutions like governments or your local Jewish federation. There are thousands of readers like you who give us $18 or $36 or $100 each month or year.
Support our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.
