The Hungarian Jewish community’s headquarters here received an anonymous threat Wednesday, from a telephone caller who said he planted a bomb on the premises because of “Jewish criticism against the pope” just before John Paul II’s visit here Friday.
The threat, which proved false, was called an obvious provocation in a statement issued by the Jewish community’s leadership.
“It is rather sorrowful that the visit of the pope can be used as a good excuse to make provocative actions against the Jewish community in Hungary,” the leaders said in the statement.
The statement was referring not only to the bomb threat but to the televised appearance of a man, identified as a Jew, who complained that the pope’s visit was inconveniencing him.
The man said he was being “deprived of (his) human rights by the papal visit,” and that security measures surrounding the pope’s visit, which include strict curbs on transportation, were preventing him from attending synagogue.
The Hungarian Jewish community leadership, which uses the acronym MIOK, said the person interviewed might not even had been a Jew, and asked for an investigation about the person.
If the person was falsely identified as a Jew, “it is a very serious provocation against the Hungarian Jewish community,” the statement said.
The pope is scheduled to meet with 10 Jewish community leaders Sunday night. The meeting was announced officially by the organizing committee for the papal visit.
The Hungarian Jewish community had officially invited the pope to visit the Dohany Street Synagogue, Europe’s largest, but the Vatican declined the offer. It also turned down a request for the pope to pay tribute at a Holocaust memorial behind the synagogue to the 600,000 Hungarian Jews murdered during the Holocaust.
A third request, asking the pope to condemn anti-Semitism while in Hungary, was also rejected by the Vatican at a news conference held by Hungarian Bishop Keresztes Szilard, a leading figure in organizing the papal visit.
Szilard said it was impossible to accept the Jewish community’s request as a precondition of the meeting between the pope and the Jews.
The bishop said that although “it is justifiable that the pope should deal with this matter, the organizers cannot give guarantees that it will be part of the pope’s speech.”
But the bishop acknowledged that “anti-Semitism is one of the greatest problems of our age.”
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
