Hungary Cancels Plans for Statue of Nazi Collaborator
Image by File
Members of the U.S. Congressional bipartisan Task Force for Combatting Anti-Semitism applauded the decision of the Hungarian government to cancel plans to erect a statue that would have honored a Hungarian Nazi collaborator.
Hungary had planned to memorialize Balint Homan, a known anti-Semite and Nazi collaborator. After learning of this, members of the task force sent a letter to Viktor Orban, prime minister of Hungary, to “express our deep concern.” The letter pointed out that Homan “spearheaded Hungary’s anti-Jewish legislation and paved the way for deportations of and atrocities against Hungarian Jews during the Holocaust.”
The Hungarian government was to provide the majority of funds for the life-size bronze statue that was to have been located in the central Hungarian town of Szekesfehevar.
Homan’s actions were responsible for “the deaths of over a half million innocent Hungarians, nearly eradicating Hungary’s pre-war Jewish population,” the lawmakers wrote.
Task force co-chairs Reps. Chris Smith, R-N.J., Nita Lowey, D-N.Y., Eliot Engel, D-N.Y., Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, D-Fla., Kay Granger, R-Texas, Steve Israel, D-N.Y., Peter Roskam, R-Ill., and Ted Deutch, D-Fla., said in a statement released on Tuesday that they hope this incident “serves as a reminder that the history of the Holocaust must be neither revised nor forgotten and the memory of the millions of victims must never be disrespected.”
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
