BUDAPEST: As the world prepares to mark International Holocaust Remembrance Day on Sunday, Hungarian Jews find themselves divided in a bitter dispute over the long-delayed opening of a new Holocaust museum in Budapest.
The “House of Fates” complex, located on the run-down fringe of the city centre, is fronted by two 15-metre (49-foot) high towers of stacked cattle wagons connected by a giant, floodlit metal bridge in the shape of the Jewish Star of David.
The 24-million-euro ($27 million) revamp of the sprawling site, a former railway station where Jews were deported to Nazi German death camps, was largely finished by 2015.
But it has remained shuttered ever since, its exhibition space empty save for furniture in dusty bubble wrap, amid wrangles over its concept, suspicions from many Jews of official attempts to whitewash history and political connections in its development.
Some 600,000 Hungarian Jews perished during the Holocaust, most of them deported in the space of a few months in 1944 with the assistance of the Hungarian authorities.
Last September the government suddenly announced that it was handing ownership of the museum to EMIH (the United Hungarian Jewish Congregation).
The group, affiliated with the international orthodox Chabad movement, was also tasked with finalising the exhibition with a historian, Maria Schmidt, who is close to Hungary’s nationalist-conservative Prime Minister Viktor Orban.
“A Holocaust museum should grab attention and stir emotion, and provide moral direction, not just information,” Slomo Koves, chief rabbi of EMIH, told AFP last week.
Koves says the museum — not likely to open before next year — will focus on personal stories of young people and aims to draw more than 100,000 high school students annually.
“Kids these days are ignorant about the Holocaust, even Jewish kids, they need to be shaken out of their apathy,” said Koves, 39, whose grandparents were Holocaust survivors.