Slomó Köves is 37 years old and he claims to be a Rabbi. I’m not so sure.
Recently he willingly joined Viktor Orbán, Hungary’s xenophobic Prime Minister while Orbán declared that no refugees can enter Hungary. “We don’t want them,” Mr. Orbán said, “We don’t want Muslim people in our country.”
Slomó Köves
Mr. Orbán didn’t spare Hungarian taxpayer’s money when ordering the building of a razor-wire fence at the southern border of his country. He has also called for a national referendum on October 2 when Hungarian people will be asked to say “No” to the EU plan to resettle refugees in member countries.
You would think that Mr. Köves, a religious man would oppose this. No, not at all. Mr. Köves of the Chabad-based Unified Hungarian Jewish Congregation stands with Mr. Orbán and he plans to vote “No.” Rabbi Köves notes: “For the Jewish community, these questions are connected to our everyday physical safety and risks to our safety.”
Slomó Köves with Ms. Anikó Lévai, wife of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán.
Yes. According to Mr. Köves Muslim refugees are dangerous. If they are allowed to Hungary they will threaten his “everyday physical safety.”
It seems that even other Chabad organizations do not agree with him.
Let’s take a look at Milan, Italy. Chabad prepares meals for Eritrian, Ethiopian, Sudanese and Syrian refugees—many of them Muslim—who temporarily stay in rooms below the Milan central train station. The retrofitted Holocaust memorial and museum has also recently become the temporary home of refugees fleeing to safety.
Upon arrival, they are given towels and toiletries, and shown to a shower area that was built just for them. But first, they enjoy a nourishing hot meal, prepared and delivered by the volunteers of the Chabad-affiliated Beteavon (“Good Appetite”) soup kitchen.
Chabad Rabbi Yigal Hazan in Milan, Italy with his kitchen staff.
Chabad Rabbi Yigal Hazan, who oversees the kitchen, says the Jewish community’s involvement with the refugees is based on the biblical commandment to “love the stranger, for you, too, were a stranger in the land of Egypt.” He said: “We ourselves were refugees running from people who wished to kill us,” said the rabbi. “In this very same spot, we are now helping others who find themselves strangers in a strange land.”
Chabad Rabbi Yigal Hazan is helping Muslim refugees in Milan, Italy
Mr. Yigan Hazan is a Rabbi, the best Chabad can offer. I’m not so sure about Mr. Köves.
One should not call himself a Rabbi if he doesn’t follow his own Torah – “Love him as yourself, for you were strangers in Egypt.” (Leviticus 19:34)
György Lázár
“Mr. Orbán didn’t spare Hungarian taxpayer’s money when ordering the building of a razor-wire fence at the southern border of his country.” He saved the Hungarian tax payers a lot of money with that fence. He also saved his people and their descendants from never ending terrorism.
Every country that muslims go to are burdened with heinous crimes and the people that let them in are always targeted for the crimes. They burden the welfare systems, they burden the judicial system and they burden the schools, prisons and hospitals as they undermine the progress of the host civilization.
All of the bleeding hearts that want non Europeans to have a better life should go to the non Europeans country and make their lives better, don’t expect the rest of the country to except them with open arms while you live far from the mess you wanted. Europeans want a better life for themselves and their children and that can’t be achieved with an alien culture that’s devoted to world domination. Europe gains nothing from these people but misery and the non Europeans gain a civilization to destroy.
Slomo Koves is not alone in his paranoia and racism. Remember the collective hysteria about the construction of a new Muslim prayer space in Budapest? The rationale for not building the prayer space was wonky: it can’t go up because it is too close to Jewish institutions.
Chabad is basically an organization based on a franchise-like structure.
Köves and his colleagues do whatever buisness they feel like for their own benefit, using the Chabad brand. Which brand is mostly a reactionary, right-wing Judaism and very often they are on the side of the holders of political power, even the most corrupt and opressive ones rather than the opressed and impoverished. The Chabadnyiks of Russia are basically Putin Tzar’s court-Jews, in Israel some Rabbis affiliated with them ( as some other Orthodox Rabbies of other streams, sects ) made some racist, reactionary statements as well… This franchise structure of course also allows the Milan branch of Chabad to act in the opposite way, it seems that they have a more open-minded, humanistic Rabbi ( maybe one with a Sphardic heritige…? ).
It is also intersting but hardly surprising that Hungarian Roman Catholic clergy is also supporting this racist hate-campaign, as opposed to the Holy See…
Angus you earned your pay for the day!
Are you related to the four legged ones?
“Slomo Koves is not alone in his paranoia and racism.
“Only the paranoid survives.” Andrew S. Grove.
Islam is not a race.
The people who engineered this Islamic invasion of Europe should be in jail and charged with treason.
@Angus, agnus brain,
you are just peddling the hateful messages of the regime.
Hungary’s , or European recent history is full of terrorism, mass slaughter and war with no Muslims involved.
The Hungarian army murdered thousands of civilians in WW2, eg. 3500 in three days in Yugoslavia. Not to mention the religious killings, down to 1980s Ireland.
And the Christian values “defenders” of the Orban ilk are not prepared to accept any discomfort or be out of pocket in practicing what they laudly preach. Jesus would have been just a disavowed bad son if he was anything close.
@Don H
“The people who engineered this Islamic invasion.. ” are not the Jews, for a change, are they?
I expect that once the oppression apparatus is firmly in place the Orban regime will find many such guilty to persecute and imprison (as all fascist regimes do).
Observer,
the apparatus is already firmly in place, they will use it whenever they feel like. The “emergency laws” with which they enabled themselves to exercise totalalitarian power, makes them possible first and foremost to overturn any law with government decrees, shut down all media, internet and telecommunication , close all borders, forbid movement inside the country, curfews, detention without charges, confiscating property and even expelling scores of people from their homes ( that basically means concentration/detention camps ) and using live ammunition against unarmed people… All of that with the legitimization of those phony-opposition vermins and the European Union which continues to finacially support the regime which serves the interests of mult-national corporations with low wages and anulling labour rights… It is good to see that their are many supporters of fascism in the so called enlightened, superior, free, Western world as well… Death to fascism, freedom to the people!!!
I don’t think we are so deep yet. More conditioning is needed before extreme actions can be successfully implemented.
But that’s where the road leads.
The refugee crisis is one of the biggest challenges facing global leadership. It can only be solved through united action, and by focusing on both the causes and consequences of the crisis. Europe’s reaction is still lacking in wisdom, not to mention the reaction of the UN. But Hungary’s reaction positively stinks. It shuns collective responsibility, and demonizes refugees as good for nothing terrorists. It panders to xenophobia, to the fears of Jews and Roma in Hungary, and Rabbi Köves is an enthusiastic fellow panderer. He should be ashamed of himself for setting such a deplorable example to his Jewish brothers and sisters.