In the Ghetto of Remembrance
The Jewish Museum in Budapest
Deutsche Fassung
Abstract
Hungary has the fourth largest Jewish community in Europe. Nonetheless, there is nothing here to indicate that Jews were once as integrated into society as nowhere else on the continent but Germany. This situation is illustrated in particular by the Jewish Museum in the middle of Budapest’s city centre. There, the history of the Jews is reduced to religious objects and the Holocaust. That the Jews were an integral part of Hungarian history is ignored. The museum is so detached from its history that visitors to the synagogues and the museum can only divine that the premises are located at the scene of the crimes committed in 1944. To this day, the Hungarian state has not found it necessary to declare this area on the grounds of the former ghetto an official memorial site.
(Osteuropa 8-10/2008, pp. 493–496)