Hungary Anti-Semitic Jobbik Party Plans Rally in Shuttered Synagogue
Efforts are underway to prevent Hungary’s far-right Jobbik party from holding a political rally in a former synagogue.
Last week, the chairman of the local chapter of the opposition Hungarian Socialist Party sent an open letter to the mayor of Esztergom urging her to bar the rally from the synagogue.
“The choice of location for the event is an unworthy, ugly, and cynical desecration of the memory of the victims of the Holocaust and the sentiments of the survivors,” the Socialist leader wrote.
The synagogue, in a city located 29 miles north of Budapest, is operated by the local government as a cultural and meeting center.
On Wednesday, The Jerusalem Post quoted the president of Mazsihisz, Hungary’s official Jewish umbrella organization, as saying that if the rally went ahead, Mazsihisz “and Jewish civil organizations will protest and physically hinder the Jobbik rally on the spot.”
The rally is part of Jobbik’s campaign ahead of elections in April. The party’s ultranationalist platform is laced with anti-Semitism and anti-Roma policy.
Jobbik is the third largest party in Hungary with 43 of the 386 seats in Parliament.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO