New holoCaust museum divides jews

BUDAPEST: A planned new Holocaust museum in Budapest has divided Hungary’s Jewish community and triggered international concerns that it will downplay the wartime role of Hungarians in the persecution and deportation of Jews.

Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s right-wing government plans to open the museum next year to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the deportation of Hungarian Jews to death camps in German-occupied Poland.

More than half a million Hungarian Jews were among six million Jews killed in Europe during the Holocaust. In a 7 September decree the government granted ownership of the new museum, called the House of Fates, to the Unified Hungarian Jewish Congregation (EMIH), one of the three registered Jewish groups in Hungary. The permanent exhibition, to be set up by the EMIH with government help and housed in a former railway station, will be based on the concept of historian Maria Schmidt, who is an ally of Orban and owns a pro-government weekly. It will use personal histories to explore the 1938-48 period in Hungary, with particular focus on children, and will also feature temporary exhibitions and education programmes. But the project, first announced in 2014, has drawn criticism from Israel’s Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center. “The museum concept clearly avoids addressing the role and responsibility of... Hungarian leaders of that era for the plight of the nation’s Jews,” Robert Rozett, Director of the Yad Vashem Libraries, said in a statement last month.