130 Jewish graves in the Hungarian capital, amid concern about rising anti Semitism here and elsewhere in the region. "This is a shameful crime," Mayor Gabor Demszky told reporters after visiting the site and offering a reward of about 4,000 Euro’s in local currency for information leading to the arrest of the vandals.
About 130 damaged graves were discovered Wednesday, June 15, with tombstones overturned or broken. The cemetery was closed since Sunday to observe the Jewish holiday Shavuot and reopened on Wednesday morning when the destruction of graves was discovered.
No slogans or graffiti were reportedly painted on them, said Hungary’s Jewish Association.
"PROPER INVESTIGATION" DEMANDED
However a politician of the main governing Hungarian Socialist Party, Laszlo Donath, said in a statement that "proper care must be taken to investigate this incident." He stressed the "fact that no neo-Nazi signs were daubed on the graves did not mean that the act had not been fuelled by the same bigotry that these symbols stood for."
The attack has added to anxiety among the Jewish community in Hungary, as the country was a close ally of Nazi Germany during the Second World War when about 600-thousand Hungarian Jews were massacred. Up to 100-thousand Jews still live in the country, Eastern Europe’s largest Jewish community outside Russia.
Recently Nazi signs were painted across the city of Debrecen, and about two Jewish cemeteries are reportedly desecrated each year in Hungary. Most of those taken into custody are teenagers, MTI said.
HUNGARIAN PYBLIC CHALLENGED
Yet "everybody in Hungarian public life must think over who bears the responsibility for such incidents," said Gabor Horn, the executive of junior liberal coalition party Alliance of Free Democrats. "Even if this act has been committed by a few misbehaving youngsters, political leaders do bear responsibility for such patterns existing in today’s society," he told MTI.
Center right opposition parties cautioned it may not have been a "conscious" act of anti Semitism. The reports of violence against Jewish targets in Hungary comes shortly after the respected Tel Aviv based Stephen Roth Institute warned of increased hatred towards Jews in Europe.
It said 2004 saw "the highest number of violent incidents" against Jews "since the end of World War II." Some hope Hungary’s newly elected president Laszlo Solyom, a former chief justice who headed the Constitutional Court, will be able to unite the country in a bid to overcome extremism.
The 63-year old Solyom, who was elected last week, will take his post when President Ferenc Madl ends his five-year term in early August. (With BosNewsLife News Center in Budapest)
