Some 200 delegates representing 31 countries attended a concert kicking off the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance conference in Budapest.

At the klezmer concert on Tuesday in the Dohany Street Synagogue, Janos Lazar, Hungary’s state secretary, said that Hungary “could not achieve what it did in the past centuries without our Jewish brothers.”

At the biannual four-day conference, delegates are discussing the Holocaust as a contemporary political issue. Lazar pledged to find the names of the 600,000 Hungarians who perished in the Holocaust and place the names on the “memorial tree” in the synagogue’s courtyard or on the Memorial Wall at the Budapest Holocaust Memorial Center.

He also reiterated a promise made earlier this year that the government’s planned Holocaust museum will not open until it is approved by Hungary’s Jewish community leaders. The museum has been criticized for omitting the culpability of Hungarians and focusing exclusively on the last year of the Holocaust, after most Hungarian Jews had already been deported.

An estimated 7,000 Holocaust survivors live in Hungary, which has a total Jewish population of more than 80,000.

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.

Don't just read the Forward - invest in it. Make a matched gift today.

Support our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

$120 $180 $360 OTHER AMOUNT