Hungary church scraps Nazi ally’s memorial set for International Holocaust day

A Budapest church says it has canceled a controversial mass and memorial for Hungary’s Nazi-allied wartime leader Miklos Horthy scheduled for the United Nations Holocaust day.

The event was set for Saturday, January 27, designated by the UN in 2005 as International Holocaust Remembrance Day to mark the 1945 liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, the largest of the Nazi death camps.

“It didn’t enter our heads when we began organizing that it fell on that date,” Zoltan Osztie, parish priest at the church and leader of event organizer the Association of Christian Professionals (KESZ), tells a religious affairs website.

Hungary’s main Jewish organization Mazsihisz criticized KESZ yesterday as well as Sandor Lezsak, a lawmaker with Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s ruling Fidesz party, who was scheduled to make a speech there.

Mazsihisz said the participation of Lezsak, also a deputy speaker of the Hungarian parliament, “tramples on the memory of all the Hungarian victims.”

Urging Orban to personally intervene, Ronald Lauder, head of the World Jewish Congress group, says that it was “truly disturbing that (the event) is being given legitimacy through the participation of a high dignitary of Hungary.”

— AFP