Top Hungary lawmaker to honor Hitler ally on Holocaust Remembrance Day — report
Deputy speaker of Hungarian parliament Sandor Lezsak to take part in church ceremony celebrating birth of wartime leader Miklos Horthy, who oversaw murder of half a million Jews
Churchgoers in Budapest said a senior lawmaker will attend a ceremony honoring the Nazi collaborator Miklos Horthy that they are organizing on International Holocaust Remembrance Day.
The KESZ group, a Christian organization, said this in an invitation for the January 27 event at Budapest’s Main Parish Church of the Assumption, noting it will be attended by Sandor Lezsak, who is deputy speaker of the National Assembly, which is the Hungarian parliament, and who is also a member of the Fidesz ruling party.
“In the Holy Mass, we remember with affection and respect the late governor Miklos Horthy (1868-1957), who was born 150 years ago,” read the invitation, according to a report Tuesday in Szombat, the Jewish Hungarian weekly. The editorialized article said the event was “provocative” though it is not yet clear whether it was planned to take place on January 27 for the date’s symbolic significance.
Also scheduled to attend is Sandor Szakaly, who in the 2014 government of Prime Minister Viktor Orban was appointed to head the Veritas Historical Research Institute. Szakaly said in an interview that year that the 1941 deportation and subsequent murder of tens of thousands of Jews was an “action of the immigration authorities against illegal aliens.”
In June, Hungarian Jews protested Orban’s inclusion of Horthy, who oversaw the murder of more than 500,000 Holocaust victims together with Nazi Germany, in a speech among those he called “exceptional statesmen” in Hungary for leading the country following the disintegration of the Austro-Hungarian Empire after World War I.
Horthy signed anti-Jewish laws in 1938 and 1939, as well as in 1920.
