Opposition parties in Hungary are protesting the nomination of a figure described as a far-right activist and anti-Semite as the country’s new ambassador to Italy. The Parliament’s Committee for European Affairs accepted the nomination by Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s rightist government of Péter Szentmihályi Szabó, but he still must face a hearing in the Committee…
A controversial Nazi occupation monument was erected in downtown Budapest in the middle of the night after an appeals court rejected a petition to halt its construction. Workers completed the main components of the memorial in Freedom Square after midnight Sunday following the decision by the Budapest Court of Appeals the previous evening, according to…
(JTA) — Peering through dusty apartment widows isn’t an uncommon pastime in this capital city’s crime-infested 8th District, with its many drug addicts and alcoholics seeking for a fix. But Adam Schoenberger wasn’t scouting for a place to rob on his peeping tour of the district earlier this month. An activist who recently moved his…
Love and Treasure By Ayelet Waldman Knopf, 352 pages, $26.95 A historical novel, the Hungarian literary critic Georg Lukács argued, should reach only as far backwards as the era of the author’s grandparents. That is because novelists build not balanced panoramas, but rather individual portraits. Real human beings are unrealistic, because they are improbably idiosyncratic….
(Reuters) — Tamas Marton was a Budapest schoolboy in 1944 when Hungarians allied to Nazi Germany helped to deport half a million Jews, including his mother, to death camps. Seventy years on, as Hungarians still grapple with the past and many support the far-right Jobbik party, the government finds itself in conflict with the Jewish…
(JTA) — It isn’t every day that Jewish organizations reject funding for Holocaust commemorations. But that’s what happened in Hungary this spring when Jewish groups refused nearly $1 million in special state grants to protest what they see as the government’s whitewashing of Hungarian complicity in the Holocaust. “We wanted to send a very strong message…
A town on the southeast outskirts of Budapest has reversed a 2012 decision to name its main square after Hungary’s Nazi-allied World War II leader Miklos Horthy. According to the Hungarian news agency MTI, the mayor of town of Gyomro said it had been a “mistake” to rename “Freedom Square” in honor of Horthy, who…
(Reuters) — Budapest’s Jewish community is vibrant, visible and patriotic; and yet seven decades after the Holocaust, the taboo about expressing anti-Semitic views is breaking down among many fellow Hungarians. Some Jews and academics blame this on the far-right Jobbik party, which has come from nowhere to become the second most popular party as one…
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