In a move that provoked a wave of stormy criticism from Jewish groups here, the Hungarian leader who handed his country over to the Nazis during World War II has been reburied in his hometown.
Adm. Miklos Horthy, who led Hungary from 1920 until late 1944, died in exile in 1957 in Portugal and was buried in Gibraltar.
He had asked that his ashes be returned to Hungary when, as he put it, the country was “free from Bolshevik occupation.”
On Saturday, 35 years after his death, Horthy was reburied in his hometown of Kenderes, in the eastern part of Hungary.
Horthy came to power in 1920 during a wave of anti-Communist violence. During his regime nearly 600,000 Hungarian Jews, mostly from the Hungarian countryside, were deported and killed by the Nazis.
He was finally pushed aside by Hitler in 1944 and sent to Bavaria.
Approximately 50,000 people attended the reburial ceremony, among them four members of the Hungarian Cabinet, all of whom denied that they were attending the event in any official capacity.
Jewish groups opposed the reburial, saying it represented an official rehabilitation of Horthy.
A day before the reburial, Hungary’s Jewish community held a silent vigil at the Holocaust memorial in Budapest to protest the government’s implicit rehabilitation of the controversial figure.
In New York, Rabbi Arthur Schneier of the Park East Synagogue deplored the reburial, calling it “most mind-boggling” and “a symbolic accommodation to rising nationalism.”
Schneier, who is spiritual leader of the World Federation of Hungarian Jews, spent the early years of World War II in Budapest.
He pointed out that Horthy “in the early 1930s was responsible for the passage of legislation that restricted Jewish participation in many of the professions.
“He was still in office after the Germans moved in in March 1944, and he did not protest the ethnic cleansing of 600,000 Jews from the entire Hungarian countryside, including my family,” he said.
Schneier added that he was writing a letter protesting the reburial to Hungarian President Jozsef Antall, whose father was a righteous Christian who rescued Jews.
Antall, in a series of interviews in Hungary last week, praised Horthy, calling him a “Hungarian patriot” who “should be placed into the community of the nation and the awareness of the people.”
(Contributing to this report was JTA staff writer Susan Birnbaum in New York.)
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.
