Austrian Jews To Boycott Holocaust Ceremony If Far-Right Ministers Attend
Far Right: Supporter of Austria?s populist Freedom Party clashes with police during demonstration. Image by getty images
A Jewish leader in Austria said community officials would not attend the nation’s official Holocaust commemoration ceremony if lawmakers from the far-right Freedom Party are present.
“If there will be ministers there for the Freedom Party, and I’m sure there will be, I will not be able to shake their hands, so the Jewish community will not attend,” Oskar Deutsch, president of the Jewish Community in Vienna, told the Makor Rishon daily on Tuesday of the annual Jan. 27 ceremony organized by Jewish groups for International Holocaust Remembrance Day.
The Jewish community has boycotted the Freedom Party, which entered the government last month and is led by Heinz-Christian Strache, now the vice chancellor of Austria. A former SS officer founded the party in the 1950s, and several of its leaders today have made anti-Semitic statements. Strache has said his party rejects anti-Semitism, but Deutsch has called the statement a facade.
In 2016, the magazine Aula, which is affiliated with the Freedom Party published an article claiming that the inmates at the Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria, where thousands of Jews were murdered, were criminals. Last year, Freedom Party lawmakers declined to stand in parliament with other lawmakers in memory of Jews killed in the 1938 Kristallnacht pogroms.
The Freedom Party garnered the third-highest vote total in the October elections, behind the center-right People’s Party and the center-left Social Democrats, helped largely by its anti-immigrant platform.
Last month, People’s Party head Sebastian Kurz and Strache announced that they had worked out a deal to have the parties govern together as coalition partners.
The Freedom Party, which seeks to limit immigration from Muslim countries, controls the interior, defense and foreign ministries.
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.
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.
