Gergely Gulyás, Head of the Prime Minister’s Office, said Hungary is currently one of the safest places in Europe for the Jewish community.
Marking International Holocaust Memorial Day on Thursday, the minister said the government makes clear its stand against all forms of anti-Semitism also on international platforms and considers remembrance and the protection of the freedom of thought important. Gulyás warned about the dangers of the current era, saying that giving up on Europe’s Judeo-Christian roots and culture “poses a danger to us all”. Migration, unless going along with integration in society, threatens the Jewish community the most, he said.
French Ambassador Pascale Andréani told the commemoration that the Holocaust had been the most serious crime ever committed in human history, adding that six million people, three-quarters of Europe’s Jewish population and more than a third of the world’s Jewish population, were exterminated. Israeli Ambassador Yacov Hadas-Handelsman said that 77 years after the Holocaust “we are still three million less” than before the start of the second world war, adding that the reason for mourning would “stay with us forever”. Russian Ambassador Evgeniy Stanislavov told the event that it was impossible to understand how people had been able to commit the cruelties of the Holocaust and it was equally impossible to understand that neo-Nazis were still holding marches on the streets of some modern European states. “This is why it is important to preserve the truth so that it stays with us as a lesson as well as a warning,” he said.
Photo credit: MTI