Hungary Slammed for Honoring Leader Who Deported Jews to Auschwitz
U.S. congressional leaders have protested the construction of a monument in Hungary to a government minister who ordered the death of some 500,000 Jews during the Holocaust.
The co-chairs of the U.S. House Bipartisan Taskforce for Combatting Anti-Semitism on Friday sent a letter to Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban protesting the monument to Balint Homan, a minister in Hungary in the 1930s and ’40s. Homan participated in drafting legislation in 1938 and ’39 that restricted the rights of Hungarian Jews, and in 1944 he called for their deportation.
Some 420,000 Hungarian Jews were deported to Auschwitz in the summer of 1944.
The life-size bronze statue of Homan, largely funded by the Hungarian government, is scheduled to be unveiled this month in the city of Szekesfehervar.
The committee in its letter wrote of its “deep concern” about the statue, saying Homan “spearheaded Hungary’s anti-Jewish legislation and paved the way for deportations of and atrocities against Hungarian Jews during the Holocaust.”
“We urge you to publicly condemn Homan’s role in the persecution and deportation of innocent Hungarians and to withdraw government funding for the construction of this or any statue in his honor,” the members wrote.
The co-chairs of the task force are Reps. Nita Lowey, Eliot Engel and Steve Israel, all New York Democrats; Ted Deutch, D-Fla.; Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, R-Fla.; Chris Smith, R-N.J.; Kay Granger, R-Texas; and Peter Roskam, R-Ill.
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