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November 5, 1999/26 Cheshvan 5760, Vol. 52, No.10
Hungary drops plans to alter Shoah exhibit
MICHAEL J. JORDAN
Jewish Telegraphic Agency
BUDAPEST - The Hungarian government has dropped plans to revamp its planned exhibit at Auschwitz after protests that the exhibit dodged the issue of Hungarian anti-Semitism.
Jewish leaders here rejected the proposed text for the exhibit, which lays the blame for the Holocaust in Hungary - in which roughly 600,000 Jews were killed - squarely on Germany's shoulders. Critics said the whitewashing of the past reinforces the perception of Hungarian Jews and other observers that this nation, like others, is unwilling to confront its role in the Holocaust.
But it's also a sign of the times: Today, the voice of the right wing increasingly prevails in the din of Hungarian politics. In September the Council of Europe branded two of the six parties in Hungary's Parliament as "extremist." Earlier this month, Istvan Csurka, the leader of a small far-right party, was the lone politician in Central Europe to praise Jorg Haider for his anti-immigrant Freedom Party's stunning performance in the Austrian elections.
In another affront to the 100,000 or so Jews still living in Hungary, right-wing politicians last week unveiled a plaque dedicated to the memory of the Hungarian royal police who died during the two world wars. However, the plaque made no mention that it was mainly these police who, after the German occupation on March 19, 1944, efficiently carried out orders to round up all the Jews from the countryside. In seven weeks, they herded 437,000 Jews into ghettoes and then deported them to various death camps.
Hungarian Jews are especially sensitive about the issue of war memorials because no administration here has ever built a monument to its murdered Jews, said Peter Tordai, head of the Hungarian Federation of Jewish Communities. "The essence of a public memorial is that it is official acknowledgment of the Jewish martyrs," Tordai said. "Establishing it, therefore, is the obligation of the Hungarian nation, not of the Jewish community. And all we ask is that any monument be accurate and complete."
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