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75th anniversary of Budapest Jewish ghetto liberation commemorated
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Hate should not be commemorated with more hatred but with dignity, Slomo Köves, the head rabbi of the Unified Hungarian Jewish Congregation (EMIH), said on Friday at a commemoration of the 75th anniversary of the liberation of the Jewish ghetto in Budapest.
“The question is not who our parents were, but what we do with their memory,” Köves said. “It is incumbent on us to furnish commemorations with content, especially when the survivors — those with personal memories of the Holocaust — are no longer among us,” he added.
Yakov Hadas-Handelsman, Israel’s ambassador to Budapest, said that as he walked on the streets of Budapest, there were memorials that “make us stop and think about the horrors of the past”. Remembering is especially important today, he added, “when anti-Semitism is on the rise again across Europe and people are openly attacked because of their religious or ethnic origin.”
Éva Fahidi, a writer and Holocaust survivor, said she belonged to a generation that “always when it remembers, it also mourns.” Whereas the ghetto’s liberation 75 years ago was gratifying, she said, it could not be commemorated without remembering the suffering of people who froze or starved within its walls.
She said she was 18 years old when she experienced that when the world turned to hatred, anything in the world could be done to her. Hate is the worst kind of emotion, Fahidi said. But those who are on the receiving end of it must surely want to be someone who doesn’t hate.”