Yad Vashem: Budapest’s new Holocaust museum ignores Hungary’s role

Yad Vashem has publicly criticized a new House of Fates Holocaust museum in Hungary that is slated to open next year.

The museum is being built by the Hungarian government a cost of over 28 million euros, but is being formally transferred to the ownership of the Chabad EMIH Jewish Federation in the country.

Hungary’s government announced its decision during a press conference just before Rosh Hashanah together with the head of the EMIH, Rabbi Shlomo Koves, and controversial historian Maria Schmidt, who directed the curating of the permanent House of Fates exhibition.

After the announcement, Yad Vashem – perhaps the world’s most complete Holocaust museum and research center – public voiced opposition to the museum, saying it ignores anti-Jewish laws passed by the Hungarian government in 1938, the deaths of tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews in forced labor that was imposed by the government, and the participation of Hungarian authorities in the deportation of Hungarian Jewry to Auschwitz.

Koves said in response that EMIH reached out to Yad Vashem in July to get help from its historians in creating the museum’s content to ensure the historical validity of the House of Fates exhibitions.

He also said that Yad Vashem was not familiar with the current content of the museum, and that a senior adviser at Yad Vashem made an informal visit to the museum only last week. Yad Vashem could not be immediately contacted to confirm this.

Dr. Robert Rozett, director of the Yad Vashem libraries and an expert on Hungarian Jewry during the Holocaust, has said that Yad Vashem was approached by the Hungarian government to participate in an international advisory forum for the House of Fates in 2013.

He said that Yad Vashem’s experts who studied the project, together with the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, raised significant concerns with the proposed concept and content and passed on these concerns to the Hungarian authorities and museum management.

According to Rozett, the project organizers did not provide any serious response to the issues raised with the museum and its concept, and that Yad Vashem subsequently disassociated itself from the project altogether in 2014.

GERGELY GULYÁS, of the Hungarian Prime Minister’s Office, said at the press conference announcing the government’s cooperation with Chabad that the museum would “present personal fates... particularly from the perspective of the child victims of the Holocaust.”

Rozett said this confirmed that the original, flawed concept remained the same, in particular focusing specifically on the personal narrative of child victims and not the broader historical context of Hungarian Jewry, and the Hungarian government’s actions before the Fascist Arrow Cross Party came to power in October 1944.

The majority of Hungarian Jews killed by the Nazis were deported between May and July 1944.

Rozett said the museum advances a narrative in which only the Germans and Arrow Cross were responsible for the murder of Hungarian Jewry.

“In other words, visitors to the House of Fates are to be shown and taught that except for a tiny, criminal and fanatic minority, the citizens of Hungary were essentially blameless for what was inflicted upon their Jewish neighbors,” says Rozett.

“To this patently misleading distortion, the concept’s planners have added a statistically disproportional over-emphasis on rescue attempts on behalf of Jews, by Hungarians. Thus, it is implied, that Hungary was actually a nation of rescuers. This is a grave falsification of history.”

Speaking to The Jerusalem Post, Rozett said the purpose of the museum was “to focus on suffering only, and not teach about the context, and the role of their own people in the deportations by Hungarians, by the gendarme, the police and the Interior Ministry.”

Koves said in response, “EMIH is fully committed to the development of a Holocaust educational center which presents the history of the Hungarian Holocaust with perfect historical credibility and the most effective means suitable for the education of the younger generations.”

He also called upon Yad Vashem to assist EMIH in achieving this aim, and for a meeting with Yad Vashem chairman Avner Shalev to discuss cooperating on the museum.

“The presentation of the current concept and the communication channel [with Yad Vashem] would be especially important, since Yad Vashem and its experts are not familiar with the current state of the content and definitely not aware of EMIH’s plans and position in this regard.”

A MEMORIAL on the banks of the Danube in Budapest uses shoes to represent Hungarian Jews who were shot during the Holocaust.