On the 78th anniversary of the deportation of Szombathely’s Jews, the Hungarian Jewish Community remembered the innocent Jewish citizens who were deported from the city in July 1944 and perished in Nazi extermination camps.
Sándor Márkus , the honorary president of the Szombathely Jewish Community, called the murder of hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews an indescribable, eternal sorrow, which also crippled the population of Szombathely.
A mourning ceremony followed led by Chief Rabbi Alfréd Schőner and Chief Cantor László Fekete.
András Heisler, the president of the Association of Hungarian Jewish Religious Communities (Mazsihisz), recalled: “from June 1944, with the active cooperation of the Hungarian authorities, 430,000 people were deported to Auschwitz in six weeks” and that “the tragedy of the Holocaust interrupted the development of the Jewish community and left irreparable gaps”.
He also emphasized that ” to have an authentic view of history, racism and exclusion must also be fought with actions”.
