200 Delegates Attend Hungary Holocaust Conference
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.
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
