Holocaust museum prompts Jewish controversy
A Hungarian museum built to remember the horrors of the Holocaust is pitting branches of the European Union’s largest eastern Jewish community against one another.
Prime Minister Viktor Orban is planning to open the House of Fates next year to pay tribute to the children who died in the Holocaust. But the project has prompted critics to say it whitewashes Hungary’s wartime role in the murder of Jews, and it has divided Jewish organizations into those allied with the government and those against it.
“We’ve gone from being rivals to being enemies,” Budapest’s chief rabbi, Robert Frolich, said of the rift between two of the country’s Jewish groups. “And when rivalry turns to war, there are no winners, only losers.”
The owner of one publication, the weekly Figyelo, is in charge of the House of Fates. The project in Budapest, where there’s already an existing Holocaust museum, has languished for years after Orban vowed not to open it until there was a consensus about it among Jewish groups.
That changed when the government lined up EMIH, a Jewish organization founded in 2004. EMIH leader Rabbi Slomo Koves said the museum would allow young generations to emotionally connect with the Holocaust.
For others, the site is at best an Orban power-play to divide Budapest’s Jewish community and at worst an attempt to obscure facts behind the murder of more than half a million Hungarian Jews.
An official from the Jerusalembased Yad Vashem museum said the planned exhibition was “patently misleading,” to the point of falsifying history. The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., said it is “highly selective” and “distorted.” The institute in charge of the new museum didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Hungary’s biggest Jewish group, Mazsihisz, said EMIH had become a tool of Orban. His government has boosted annual state funds supporting EMIH 33-fold to $2.4 million since he returned to power in 2010 and has pledged to give it the museum.
“This is about political power, and no Jewish group should play a part in this,” said Mazsihisz President Andras Heisler. “We repeatedly asked for a full ‘screenplay’ of the exhibition so that we could responsibly take part in this project. We never received that.”
Much of Budapest’s Jewish population survived after Hungary stopped mass deportations in the waning months of World War II as Soviet forces advanced toward the country. Hungary today has an estimated Jewish community of about 100,000, according to Mazsihisz.