Some three years ago I was visiting Prague and there, amongst the few remaining Jewish monuments was the relatively new, elegant Spanish Synagogue. Despite its elegance and attractive style, my interest was rather caught by the representative exhibition in the women’s gallery showing the ample contribution the Jews of Prague provided to Czech and European culture at large. It was […]
The Simon Wiesenthal Center issued a scathing statement on Hungary’s Orbán government, after the regime in Budapest decided to award rabidly racist columnist Zsolt Bayer, who has advocated for genocide against the Roma minority and has bemoaned that more Jews were not murdered in a pogrom in 1919/20, with a major national award. The Hungarian Free Press has long shared […]
The Orbán government’s decision to award one of its own with a state medal–Fidesz founder and rabidly racist columnist Zsolt Bayer–has convinced a growing number of prominent Hungarians to return their state distinctions in protest. The message is clear and simple: if the singularly foul-mouthed Mr. Bayer can be recognized by the Orbán regime with the Hungarian Middle Cross–a publicist […]
Quite a political storm is brewing in Hungary, after Ronald S. Lauder of the World Jewish Congress named Hungary Europe’s most anti-Semitic country. Specifically, Mr. Lauder said the following: “The worst offender is Hungary. Because they now have a neo-Nazi party called Jobbik. They had started to put up statues of Admiral Horthy, who was a Nazi.” András Heisler, President of the […]
Béla Biszku, who died at age 94 last week, was Hungary’s most infamous unrepentant hard-line communist and the only official of the former pre-1989 regime ever prosecuted for crimes against humanity. Biszku served in the Hungarian Workers’ Party (Magyar Dolgozók Pártja) from 1949, as well as in its successor, the Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party (Magyar Szocialista Munkáspárt – MSZMP), including […]
HFP’s Hungarian-language sister publication, the Kanadai Magyar Hírlap, published a lengthy and–we think–insightful interview with András Heisler, the President of the Federation of Hungarian Jewish Communities (Mazsihisz), during his official visit to Canada this week. Mr. Heisler was coming alongside Deputy State Secretary Csaba Latorcai and spent five days in Canada, meeting with various levels of federal government, including the […]
Officials from Hungary’s Orbán government, including Minister of Human Resources Zoltán Balog, met with Jewish community leaders this week to discuss new efforts to improve Holocaust education in Hungarian schools and to alert Hungarian Jews to the fact that they too may be “impacted” by the continued wave of refugees, arriving primarily from war-torn Syria and Afghanistan. Based on the […]
The Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) issued a statement a few weeks ago on antisemitism in Hungary, during a joint visit to Budapest by Michael Georg Link, the director of the OSCE’s Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights, and Rabbi Andrew Baker of Washington, DC. The Hungarian media quoted parts of the statement, but did not […]
Hungarian newsmakers didn’t like UN Ambassador Samantha Power’s criticism of the Hungarian Government’s attempt to rewrite World War II history – so they rewrote her speech. Why not? Hungarian news sources often ignore important stories, but in this case they went one step further; they turned the table and rewrote it. They added lines she never said, a rant about […]
I am speaking about democracy in a nutshell today, because pretty well that’s all is left of Hungarian democracy by today. In fact, it is even quite loose in that nutshell, after having shrunk so small. On December 31 2013, in the late night hours, as the country was well on its way to get drunk and celebrate the new year, […]
