Mazsihisz has called for a ban on the naming of public spaces after the country’s wartime leader Miklós Hórthy, an ally of Adolf Hitler who oversaw the deportation of hundreds of thousands of Jews to the Nazi death camps. The call by the Federation of Hungarian Jewish Communities followed the decision on Tuesday by the mayor of Kunhegyes, a small town in eastern Hungary, to rename a street after Hórthy.
"Miklós Horthy was at the helm in Hungary when the entire Hungarian administration and many among the population enthusiastically took part in the rounding up of Jews," Mazsihisz said in a statement, adding that it should therefore be excluded in a democracy to name public places after Horthy. The Jewish group urged the government and parliament of Hungary to take the necessary steps for a ban.
Hungary had a responsibility to not only commemorate and condemn the horrors of the Holocaust in words but to "do everything that those responsible for genocide do not become role models for the Hungarian people," the statement ended.
An autocrat who ruled from 1920 to 1944 when he was deposed by Nazi Germany, Horthy is revered by some as a hero who saved the country after a short-lived Communist revolution in 1919 and the traumatic loss of two-thirds of its territory at the 1920 Trianon Peace Treaty. He also passed anti-Jewish laws and brought the country into an uneasy alliance with Hitler. Horthy had "direct responsibility for the killing and destruction of several hundred thousand Hungarian Jews," Mazsihisz said in its statement on Wednesday.
Mazsihisz President Peter Feldmajer last year said in the European Parliament that at a time when “streets and squares are named after Horthy, who stands as a hero for the people, the Hungarian Jewish people feel increasing danger.”
Meanwhile, Hungary's Constitutional Court annulled part of a law that ban the use of symbols associated with Nazi and Communist dictatorships. The 20-year-old law carried fines for wearing or promoting symbols like an SS-badge, the Hungarian Nazi arrow-cross, the hammer and sickle, the five-pointed red star or images including those symbols. The court said the annulled the passages which were not sufficiently clear-cut.
