Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust Remembrance Authority, is at loggerheads with Benjamin Netanyahu over his talks with Hungary over proposals for a new museum.
Officials from the Israeli Prime Minister’s office met Hungarian government representatives last week to discuss establishing a “consensus narrative” for Budapest’s planned House of Fates.
But the project has been criticised by Hungary’s Jewish community and Yad Vashem for championing a narrative that absolves Hungarians of complicity in Jewish deportations to Auschwitz during the Second World War.
The official version of Hungary’s 20th century history has long been a source of conflict between Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz party and Hungarian Jews. The community says various government-funded projects have whitewashed the antisemitic record of the wartime Horthy regime.
The government’s main museum — the House of Terror — minimises the Holocaust in relation to the Communist period.
The new Budapest Holocaust museum is to open next year, but the local Jewish leadership is concerned that its historic narrative will be influenced by a body headed by historian Maria Schmidt, who champions a narrative that says Hungarians were not complicit in the Nazi deportations.
Hungary’s main community representative body and the World Jewish Congress have both demanded that Dr Schmidt is not involved in the project.
But a smaller Jewish organisation led by Chabad rabbi Shlomo Koves, who is a vocal supporter of Mr Orbán, has partnered with the government in preparations for the new museum.
The tensions are amplified by Mr Netanyahu’s recent courting of Mr Orbán, who he sees as Israel’s main ally today in the European Union. When Hungary’s Jewish community condemned a government campaign against Hungarian-born Jewish financier George Soros, the Israeli Prime Minsiter withdrew a statement supporting them in order to assuage Mr Orbán.
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