Former far-right Hungarian pol with Jewish roots is moving to Israel
Csanad Szegedi says he has already begun process of aliya for himself, his wife and their two children
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A former Hungarian politician who resigned from his right-wing nationalist party after discovering he has Jewish roots said he is immigrating to Israel.
Csanad Szegedi told a World Zionist Organization conference last weekend that he is planning to move to the Jewish state with his wife and two children.
Szegedi was a member of the anti-Semitic, far-right Jobbik party starting in 2003 and served in various leadership roles. The Anti-Defamation League described Jobbik as “openly anti-Semitic” during his time in the party.
“After the nightmares that my relatives underwent in the Holocaust, my family and I very much want to be part of the positive dream that Israel constitutes for us,” he told the Hebrew-language Maariv newspaper, adding that he had already submitted immigration paperwork.
In 2012, Szegedi publicly revealed that he had Jewish relatives, including his maternal grandmother, an Auschwitz survivor. He resigned from all Jobbik positions in July 2012 and gave up his party membership. That wasn’t good enough for the party: the next month it asked him to give up his seat in the European Parliament as well. Jobbik said the issue was suspected bribery, not his Jewish roots. Szegedi stayed in the European parliament as an independent.
Szegedi met in August 2012 with Rabbi Slomo Koves, of Hungary’s Orthodox Chabad-Lubavitch community, whose own parents were in their teens when they discovered they were Jewish.
“As a rabbi… it is my duty to receive every person who is in a situation of crisis and especially a Jew who has just now faced his heritage,” Koves said.
Szegedi said in 2013 that he is keeping Shabbat and trying to observe the laws of Kashrut. “I have discovered that I can reconcile my conservative viewpoints as Hungarian and as observant Jew,” he told German newspaper Welt am Sonntag.
Judaism is traced from mother to child, meaning that under Jewish law Szegedi is Jewish. Szegedi said he defines himself as someone with “ancestry of Jewish origin — because I declare myself 100 percent Hungarian.”
Times of Israel staff contributed to this report
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