(JTA) — Police in Budapest have arrested a far-right activist on suspicion of defacing Holocaust memorials in the city.
Béla Incze, a leader of the far-right 64 Counties Movement, or HVIM, was arrested early last week, according to local media. He is suspected of scrawling anti-Semitic slogans on a Holocaust memorial on the bank of the Danube River in May.
Hungarian media said he is also under suspicion of having defaced a memorial to Holocaust hero Raoul Wallenberg by hanging severed pigs’ feet on a statue of the Swiss diplomat, and of vandalizing a memorial to the Soviet army.
The website politics.hu quoted a member of parliament from the far-right Jobbik movement as telling a rally last week that “the desecration of the Jewish memorial on the Danube embankment or anywhere else can easily be described as trivial.”
In a separate development, local media said hundreds of people last week demonstrated outside the Human Resources Ministry in Budapest against the inclusion in the school curriculum of works by three 20th-century writers deemed anti-Semitic: Albert Wass, Dezső Szabó and József Nyirő.
