Hungary’s Jews are in no danger and need not feel they should leave the country,
Budapest’s envoy to Israel, Zoltan Szentgyorgyi, told The Jerusalem Post on
Wednesday.
Szentgyorgyi was relating to far-right Hungarian political
leader Marton Gyongyosi’s call for the government to draw up a list of Jews in
Hungary who posed a “national security threat.”
There are an estimated
100,000 Jews in the country.
“As a Hungarian patriot, my goal is to live
in a country where communities can live according to their culture and
tradition, and would like to raise my children in such a place,” the ambassador
said.
Szentgyorgyi, who has served as his country’s envoy to Israel for
the last five years, stressed that the Hungarian government roundly condemned
Gyongyosi’s suggestion.
Gyongyosi is the deputy leader of the far-right,
anti-Semitic and anti-Roma Jobbik party, which is the third-largest party in the
Hungarian parliament with 47 of the parliament’s 386 seats.
Szentgyorgyi
said that all the country’s political parties condemned the move, and that a
spontaneous demonstration against it took place in front of the Hungarian
parliament with demonstrators wearing yellow stars in solidarity.
The
ambassador said it was impossible to deny that anti-Semitism existed in
Hungary, and that the way to reduce the influence of the extremist party was by
“good governance.”
Szentgyorgyi said he expected the Jobbik party to lose
ground in the 2014 elections.
He added that despite manifestations of
anti-Semitism, the Israeli public still trusts Hungary, as hundreds of Israeli
families send their children to study in Hungarian universities and Israeli
investors continue to invest in the economy. He said that while anti-Semitism
was not a “cloud” over bilateral ties, it was an “important point” for Israeli’s
political class.
“We understand this,” he said, urging Israelis not to
paint all Hungarians with one brush, but to make the distinction between one
extremist party and the rest of the political movements in the
country.
What was important, he said, was that the Hungarian government,
all the other political parties and the president issued
condemnations..
Knesset Speaker Reuven Rivlin, however, urged the country
to do more, including outlawing the Jobbik party. He wrote a letter to Hungarian
President Janos Ader saying it was “hard to believe that this terrible proposal
could be heard in a European parliament in 2012. It is hard to believe that the
lessons of World War II, when Jews were counted and then led in cattle cars to
ghettos and extermination camps, was not learned and engraved in the chronicles
of European nations.”
Rivlin pointed out that Ader, who visited Israel
earlier this year in conjunction with ceremonies marking the 100th birthday of
Raoul Wallenberg, told the Knesset that it was imperative for the world to take
a strong and moral stand against anti-Semitism. He called on the Hungarian
president to take practical measures toward stamping out anti- Semitism in
Hungary, including outlawing Jobbik. He said the president had the democratic
tools for further legislation to “isolate people and phenomena that represent a
danger to the free world and to Hungary itself.”