Peres: We must not ignore the rise of extreme right wing parties

State officially marks Holocaust Remembrance Day with ceremony at Yad Vashem.

By SAM SOKOL
President Shimon Peres speaks at Yad Vashem to mark Holocaust Remembrance Day, April 27, 2014. (photo credit: MARC ISRAEL SELLEM/THE JERUSALEM POST)
President Shimon Peres speaks at Yad Vashem to mark Holocaust Remembrance Day, April 27, 2014.
(photo credit: MARC ISRAEL SELLEM/THE JERUSALEM POST)
President Shimon Peres warned of the dangers of Europe’s extreme-right during a state ceremony marking the beginning of Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Day, in Jerusalem yesterday. Addressing a crowd of thousands at Yad Vashem, Peres marked the seventieth anniversary of the destruction of Hungarian Jewry and noted that antisemitism is again on the rise in the former Soviet republic.
“The President of Hungary will take part tomorrow in the March of the Living in Poland, a gesture worth of admiration,” Peres said. “However, we must not ignore any occurrence of anti-Semitism, any desecration of a synagogue, any tomb stone smashed in a cemetery in which our families are buried. We must not ignore the rise of extreme right wing parties with neo-Nazi tendencies who are a danger to each of us and a threat to every nation.”
Peres was specifically referring to the rise of the fringe Jobbik party to Hungary’s third largest parliamentary faction. Termed a neo-Nazi party by both the World Jewish Congress and the Federation of Hungarian Jewish Communities (Mazsihisz), Jobbik won twenty percent of the seats in the Hungarian legislature during elections earlier this month.
The Mazsihisz and several other organizations are currently boycotting all official government Holocaust commemorations in protest of what they believe is the ruling administration’s “relativization” of Hungary’s role in their community’s destruction.
In comments earlier on Sunday, European Jewish Congress President Dr. Moshe Kantor warned that if parties like Jobbik continue to make gains throughout the continent, the future of European Jewry will be in doubt.
“The State of Israel of today is not only the only possible memorial standing for our perished brothers and sisters. Israel is a deterrence against any attempt at another Holocaust. A strong Israel is our response to the horrors of anti-semitism but it does not excuse the rest of the world from its responsibility to prevent this disease from returning to their own homes,” Peres continued.
Peres also lightly touched on Israel’s relations with its neighbors in the wake of the breakdown in talks with the Palestinian Authority, saying that “we are strong enough to repel dangers, we should not be scared of threats and we must not give up on peace.”
“As a member of the Jewish people I may not and I cannot forget the horrors of the Holocaust. As a citizen of Israel I will do everything in my power to ensure that the Nazis will not rise again. As a human being I will do everything in my power to bring peace between peoples. Between races. Between religions. Between nations.”
Peres recounted the murder of Budapest’s Jews at the banks of the Danube, which was “painted red” with the blood of Jewish men, women and children.
"Children were tied to their mothers, the young to the elderly. The bodies of the victims are pushed into the chilling, foaming waters of the Danube. Their cries rise to the heavens and are left without an echo. The perpetrators stand with smiles on their faces, as if they carried an act of heroism and won a brave battle,” he said.
Peres also recalled the destruction of his hometown of Vishneva.
“In Vishneva the Nazis used a different technique. They didn't shoot the Jews. They burnt them alive. The Nazis, Germans and locals, gathered up all the Jews left in Vishneva, (half had already emigrated to Israel) and forced them to march to the synagogue which was made of wood,” he said. “My grandfather, wrapped in a Jewish prayer shawl, stood at the head of the march, Rabbi Zvi Meltzer may peace be upon his soul. The same prayer shawl that I huddled under every Yom Kippur to listen to him recite the Kol Nidre prayer in his beautiful voice. They locked the doors of the synagogue and set it on fire with all the Jews still inside. No-one survived. Nothing was left of the synagogue. I can still hear the Kol Nidre prayer, which my grandfather would recite, in my heart.”
Returning to Vishneva as Israel’s Foreign Minister years later, Peres remarked on how the train station from which he left to come to Israel as a child was also the “station that took my people to the death camps.”
“What happened to them could have happened to me. It could have happened to many of us here tonight,” he said.
Ashkenazic Chief Rabbi Rabbi David Lau read psalms for the dead while Sephardic Chief Rabbi
Yitzhak Yosef recited Kaddish for the martyrs and IDF chief cantor Lt. Col Shai Abramson sang the El Malei Rachamim prayer.
Former Chief Rabbi Israel Meir Lau, himself a survivor and the chairman of the Yad Vashem Council, lit a memorial torch while six survivors Asher Aud, Zvi Michaeli, Dita Kraus, Chayim Herzl, Hinda Tasman and Itzchak Biran, lit torches, each of which represented a million victims.
A video of each survivor recalling their story and detailing their lives after making aliyah was shown prior to the kindling of their torch.
The theme of this year’s ceremony was life on the edge, expressing the situation in which European Jewry found itself in 1944.
According to Yad Vashem, that was the “year in which everything depended on the scales of time, and the Jews remaining in Europe were asking themselves: will the Red Army from the east and the Allies from the west arrive before the Germans come to murder whoever is still alive?”
While Yad Vashem is usually reluctant to weigh in on political matters, the Holocaust museum issued a statement on Sunday in response to Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’ statement calling the Holocaust “the most heinous crime to have occurred against humanity in the modern era.”
“Holocaust denial and revisionism are sadly prevalent in the Arab world, including among Palestinians” and thus such a statement “might signal a change, and we expect it will be reflected in PA websites, curricula and discourse,” the museum said in a statement.
On Sunday evening the Government Press Office emailed journalists a list of instances of Holocaust denial by the Hamas terror organization, with which the PA has announced it will sign a reconciliation agreement.