A Jewish leader in Austria says community officials will not attend the nation’s official Holocaust commemoration ceremony if lawmakers from the far-right Freedom Party are present.
“If there will be ministers there for the Freedom Party, and I’m sure there will be, I will not be able to shake their hands, so the Jewish community will not attend,” Oskar Deutsch, president of the Jewish Community in Vienna, tells the Makor Rishon daily of the annual Jan. 27 ceremony organized by Jewish groups for International Holocaust Remembrance Day.
The Jewish community has boycotted the Freedom Party, which entered the government last month and is led by Heinz-Christian Strache, now the vice chancellor of Austria.
A former SS officer founded the party in the 1950s, and several of its leaders today have made anti-Semitic statements. Strache has said his party rejects anti-Semitism, but Deutsch has called the statement a facade.
— JTA
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