An Israeli recovery team will search Hungary's Danube River for remains of Holocaust victims, with Hungarian permission and assistance, so they can be brought to Israel for burial, Interior Minister Arye Deri said during a visit to the Hungarian capital, Monday.
According to the Holocaust memorial Yad Vashem, some 565,000 Hungarian Jews were killed in the Holocaust, the majority of them deported to the Auschwitz death camp between May and July 1944.
In October of that year, when the pro-Nazi Arrow Cross party took power in Hungary, thousands of Jews from Budapest were murdered on the banks of the Danube, their bodies were thrown into the river.
Deri said his Hungarian counterpart, Sandor Pinter, had agreed to his request to have the Zaka search and rescue service provide special equipment for the operation.
"I hope that immediately, tomorrow, the righteous men of Zaka will bestow mercy on these highest of martyrs and bring them to Jewish burial," Deri said in a video posted on Twitter.
The Hungarian Interior Ministry did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
On a visit to Israel this week, Hungarian Secretary of State for Churches, Minorities, and Civil Affairs Miklos Soltesz met with Chief Rabbi David Lau.
During their Sunday meeting, Soltesz told Lau about a number of laws passed recently in Hungary that aimed to make it easier for the country's Jews to preserve their religious lifestyle, including one law that cuts through the red tape entailed in renovating the old synagogues throughout the country and new regulations that make it easier for land to be transferred to Jewish communities.
Lau told Soltesz, "I appreciate your effort to protect the Jewish community, which is carrying on the tradition, and I would like to thank you and [Hungarian] Prime Minister Viktor Orbán for both your help in the past and the plans for the future. The way to a better world is if we all know how to value each other's past and future."
