Board President to meet Hungary minister

THE BOARD of Deputies President Marie van der Zyl is to meet a senior member of Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s Hungarian government to convey the community’s “profound disquiet” over the country’s treatment of its Jewish population.

Mrs van der Zyl will meet Deputy State Secretary of Hungary Vince Szalay-Bobrovniczky during his visit to the UK later this month – in which he is also scheduled to speak at the University of Oxford’s Chabad Society.

Issues due to be raised by the Board include allegedly antisemitic references to Hungarian-born Jewish financier George Soros during the recent Hungarian elections; attacks on the Jewish community in pro-government magazines; and moves to close the Aurora Jewish community centre in Budapest.

Defending her decision to meet the Hungarian government, the Board President said: “Prime Minister Orban has suggested the Deputy

Secretary of

Marie van der Zyl State, Vince Szalay-Bobrovniczky, discuss these serious issues with us and to speak to a range of other Jewish organisations. The Hungarian government is not able to ignore our repeated raising of these concerns.

“We will use this opportunity to convey our profound disquiet about the situation and our expectation that we will see rapid improvement in terms of the government’s behaviour towards the Hungarian Jewish community. “No meetings with the Board of Deputies or other British organisations should be able to be misconstrued as a show of support for the Hungarian government while these issues remain outstanding. It is important that the Deputy Secretary of State is able to return to Budapest with a clear and unified message from the Jewish community that we care deeply that no form or racism, including antisemitism, should be propagated or tolerated.” In November, during a meeting with British Prime Minister Theresa May, Mrs van der Zyl also asked the government to “carefully calibrate its engagement around governments, like those of Hungary’s Viktor Orban or Malaysia’s Mahathir Mohamed, who trade in anti-Jewish tropes”.