Hungary Jewish leader laments comment linking Merkel, Nazis

Federation president had said chancellor was highest-ranking German dignitary to visit since Eichmann

By AP 6 February 2015, 6:15 am Edit

German Chancellor Angela Merkel stands in front of a historic picture of the Auschwitz concentration camp as she gives a speech during the International Auschwitz Committee’s remembrance ceremony in Berlin to mark the 70th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi death camp, on January 26, 2015. (photo credit: AFP/Tobias Schwarz)

BUDAPEST, Hungary — A leader of Hungary’s Jewish community has apologized for saying that Chancellor Angela Merkel was the highest-ranking German official to visit Budapest’s Dohany Street Synagogue since Adolf Eichmann, one of the Nazi officials who organized the Holocaust.

The Federation of Hungarian Jewish Communities said Thursday that comments by its president, Andras Heisler, in the weekly Hetek magazine had only meant to illustrate “what a long historical way Germany has come from the Holocaust to the present.”

In the interview, Heisler also mentioned that Monday’s meeting between Merkel and leaders of Hungary’s Jewish groups took place in the room “from where Eichmann issued his deadly orders.”

More than 550,000 Hungarian Jews were killed in the Holocaust.