A Budapest church has called off a memorial mass it was planning to hold in honor of a former Hungarian leader and Nazi ally on Saturday - International Holocaust Remembrance Day - after protests from Hungarian Jews and the World Jewish Congress.
The deputy speaker of the Hungarian parliament, Sandor Lezsak, had been due to speak at the ceremony for Miklos Horthy, stirring protests from the Federation of Hungarian Jewish Communities. Lezsak is also a member of the ruling Fidesz party of Prime Minister Viktor Orban.
The planned ceremony for Horthy, an admiral who led Hungary for 24 years until 1944 and handed over hundreds of thousands of Jews to the Nazis, triggered strong objections from Jewish organizations.
The Budapest church that had organized the Catholic ceremony canceled the event on Thursday.
The affair, ahead of a parliamentary election on April 8, has thrown a spotlight on the policies of Orban, who has an ambivalent track record on anti-Semitism.
While Orban has repeatedly pledged zero tolerance for anti-Semitism, he has called Horthy an "exceptional statesman." He has risked angering Israel and Jewish people with remarks about "ethnic homogeneity" apparently aimed at radical right-wing voters ahead of the April 8 election.
Orban has also used a massive billboard campaign against U.S. billionaire George Soros, a Hungarian-born Jew, to promote an anti-immigrant agenda that critics, including Soros, say harks back to the 1930s. The government strongly rejects this.
Zoltan Osztie, the priest of the Budapest church, said the church had a tradition of organizing a mass for Horthy each year and nobody had noticed that Saturday coincided with International Holocaust Remembrance Day.
"We could be blamed for this perhaps, but these two events cannot be juxtaposed. Nonetheless, after discussion with church leaders a decision has been made that neither the memorial ceremony nor the mass will take place," he told a Hungarian website.
World Jewish Congress President Ronald S. Lauder asked Orban to intervene, calling the event "nothing short of a provocative measure."
"The terror that Admiral Horthy, an unabashed anti-Semite, inflicted on the Jewish community of Hungary ... and his role in the deportation and murder of hundreds of thousands of Jews must never be forgotten and can never be excused," Lauder wrote in a letter to Orban.
After Hungary's occupation by Germany in March 1944, Hungarian gendarmes and state organizations collaborated in the deportation of close to half a million Jews. Horthy only acted to stop the deportations in July 1944.
