“Remembrance is a part of our shared future,” András Heisler, the president of the Federation of Hungarian Jewish Communities (Mazsihisz), said on Monday at a commemoration of the 77th anniversary of the liberation of the Jewish ghetto in Budapest.
Heisler said the survivors of the Holocaust would soon all be gone “and we’ll be left to ourselves with the duty and curse of remembrance”, adding that the descendants of Holocaust survivors had a duty to keep the memories of their ancestors alive, because otherwise they would be disowning the suffering their parents and grandparents had endured.
József Sebes, head of the Raoul Wallenberg Association, said his organization wanted to honor the actions of its namesake Swedish diplomat, who rescued tens of thousands of Jews during the Holocaust in Hungary, by contributing to a way of thinking that people should be judged by their personalities and not based on their belonging to a certain group. Sebes named the fight against racial, religious and political discrimination as a key goal of the association.
The United Hungarian Jewish Community (EMIH) also held a commemoration at The Shoes on the Danube Bank Holocaust memorial on the occasion of the 77th anniversary of the liberation of the Budapest ghetto. Slomó Köves, EMIH’s chief rabbi, said they were commemorating the hundreds of thousands of Hungarian victims who died during the Holocaust “for what they were, not for what they did”. He said remembrance must be turned into action. Jewish teaching, he added, held that accepting love without rationalising it was the surest way to vanquish meaningless, unreasonable hatred.
Photo credit: MTI