Comments (0)Nationalist Guard Has No Legal Recourse in Hungary
December 20, 2009Budapest
JTA Wire Service
Hungary’s Supreme Court upheld an order disbanding of the Hungarian Guard, which is identified with the extreme nationalist Jobbik Party.
Wednesday’s decision was the third judicial ruling within a year making the openly racist paramilitary organization illegal, and exhausting all avenues of further appeal within Hungary.
Jobbik chairman Gabor Vona said following the ruling that the Guard would nevertheless continue to function pending an appeal to the European Court of Human Rights.
The order to disband applies to both the Guard and the Guard Society to which it formally belongs. The Supreme Court said the organizations had abused their own charter, as well as the democratic right of assembly, by targeting and deliberately generating fear in racially defined Hungarian minority groups.
The Guard is modeled after the wartime Hungarian Arrow Cross bands that killed thousands of Jews during the Holocaust. Its ranks include uniformed units of the “Guard Gendarmerie,” modeled after the main Hungarian law enforcement agency assisting Nazi Germany in the deportation of hundreds of thousands of Jews, as well as Gypsies, to Auschwitz.
Jobbik has achieved major electoral gains in Hungary during the current recession and is widely expected to emerge as a substantial parliamentary force in the 2010 national vote.
Facebook Page Set to Save Szarvas Camp
A Facebook page and fund-raising campaign have been launched to save Szarvas, central Europe’s largest Jewish summer camp.
The American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, which runs the camp in southern Hungary, announced last week that camp operations would be cut in half this year due to the global economic crisis.
In response, former campers and counselors formed a “Save Szarvas” Facebook group that signed up nearly 500 members within a few days. They also turned a Szarvas blog site into a fund-raising appeal.
The camp, a joint initiative of the JDC and the Ronald S. Lauder Foundation, was opened in 1990 and became a flagship project for Jewish education and youth outreach.
Approximately 2,000 young Jews, half from Hungary and half mainly from Eastern Europe, attend each summer.
The budget cuts mandate two rather than four camp sessions next summer and reduced international participation.
Moldovan Government ‘Regrets’ Menorah Incident
The Moldovan government has expressed “deep regret” over the tearing down of a public menorah in its capital.
In a letter to Richard Stone, chairman of the NCSJ, an advocacy group for Jews in the former Soviet Union, and Mark Levin, NCSJ executive director, Moldovan U.S. Ambassador Nicolae Chirtoaca wrote that “(T)he Republic of Moldova is a democratic state and guarantees the fundamental human rights and freedoms, whereas hatred, intolerance, xenophobia and other negative phenomena are inadmissible.”
On Sunday, some 200 fundamentalist Orthodox Christians took down the Chanukah menorah in downtown Chisinau that had had been installed by the Jewish community and planted a wooden cross in its place. Neither police nor onlookers intervened as the large, metal menorah in Europe Square was placed upside down on Stefan cel Mare Square at the base of a statue of King Stephen the Great.
News footage showed a bearded priest leading the group in chanting anti-Semitic slogans during the incident.
According to the letter, the Moldovan government has “called on representatives of all religious confessions, ethnic groups and all citizens to abstain from actions that may damage harmony in society, friendship and co-existence of various ethnic groups and religious confessions, peace and good understanding.”
This story reprinted courtesy of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.