Armed with a powerful New York public relations outfit and a pledge to commemorate the mass deportation of Hungarian Jewry, the Hungarian government is preparing to challenge what it says is an inaccurate image of a country lax in confronting home-grown extremism. Ferenc Kumin, an adviser to Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban who handles international…
● I Kiss Your Hands Many Times: Hearts, Souls, and Wars in Hungary By Marianne Szegedy-Maszák Spiegel & Grau, 370 pages, $27 World War II and the Holocaust extinguished so many millions of lives, so many hopes, that each reclaimed story seems like a precious work of salvage. In “I Kiss Your Hands Many Times:…
Hungary will use all political and legal tools available to crack down on resurgent anti-Semitism in the country, the deputy prime minister said on Tuesday, in one of the government’s boldest statements yet on the issue. “We cannot allow, especially knowing our own responsibility, anti-Semitism to gain strength in Hungary,” Tibor Navracsics told a conference…
A disused train station in Budapest will soon become a $22 million Holocaust memorial center. Janos Lazar, the Hungarian prime minister’s chief of staff, said the memorial will feature an educational center and will be opened by spring next year at Budapest’s Jozsefvaros train station, the Hungarian news agency MTI reported Thursday. That timing coincides…
In a nondescript apartment building in Budapest’s Eighth District, Rabbi Sholom Hurwitz stands behind a wooden podium and claps out the beat to a raucous Sephardic melody. About 30 people, most of them men, pray together in the flat’s main sanctuary, a small living room that the congregants affectionately call their shtibl — from the…
Amid fresh warnings of anti-Semitism in Hungary, some 100,000 Jews from across Europe are expected to attend Budapest’s largest-ever Jewish Summer Festival. The week-long cultural festival, which opened Saturday, is being hosted for the 16th year running by the Federation of Hungarian Jewish Communities, or MAZSIHISZ, and co-organized by the Israeli Jewish Congress. “Part of…
Hannah Senesh was a young Hungarian poet and diarist who was captured and executed November 7, 1944, at age 23, by military police after parachuting into Yugoslavia and then entering Hungary to try to smuggle Jews out of the country. Many know of her brave act of enlisting with the British army and the Haganah,…
A 98-year-old Hungarian man has died awaiting trial on charges of torturing Jews and helping send them to Auschwitz in World War Two, his lawyer said on Monday. Laszlo Csatary, who always denied the accusations, died of pneumonia in a Budapest hospital on Saturday, lawyer Gabor Horvath told Reuters. The Nazi-hunting Simon Wiesenthal Center named…
