In addition to paying our last respects, we are here to state that we do not want hatred and war, but we want peace and atonement, the Minister of Human Capacities said at the interment at the Kozma utca Jewish cemetery on Friday of the human remains found at Margaret Bridge in Budapest.
Zoltán Balog said: „not only do we not want, but we do not tolerate the destruction of lives by human or state violence as happened in 1944 when the occupiers and Hungarian State agencies destroyed innocent Jewish lives together”. The Minister highlighted: the interment of the human remains found at Margaret Bridge in 2011, too, indicates what a long way leads to fair remembrance. There are ditches and obstacles on this way, but there are also instances of finding one another, and „we sincerely believe that there will be more and more” people finding one another.
Mr Balog also pointed out that even some three decades after the change of regime, interments are still not over, and they will not be over until the last victim of wars and dictatorships „returns home”. „We have to be here, we have to stand by to receive those who return home, and to receive the victims of Shoah”, he said. He added: „those who were disowned from the community of the nation, who were humiliated in their dignity, their Jewish roots and their Hungarian affiliation, who were shamelessly robbed and were eventually bestially murdered are our common loss”.
András Heisler, President of the Federation of Jewish Communities in Hungary (Mazsihisz) stressed: „the past of Jewish and non-Jewish Hungarians is irrevocably common”. Those who are buried today were not known by their relatives, but this fatelessness gives them a chance to belong to us all in the future, and for the entire national community to become their relatives and to foster their memory, he said.
He highlighted that the bones washed by water were irrevocably mixed together, they have no names or faces, and they do not have and will perhaps never have personal memories. As a result, their interment does not only represent the people shot into the Danube in the last few months of the war, but „also those who did not even have bones left, only ashes or not even ashes. At the same time, their interment also represents the interment of those who would be the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of the murdered people, those who should be with us today”, the President of Mazsihisz added.
Chief Rabbi Péter Kardos (Mazsihisz) pointed out: even upon the passage of seventy years, God took care that we observe the commandments of the Torah. Do not forget! He added: it is some relief for us that these lost human remains are finding a final place of rest, Jews and non-Jews, all creatures of God. He finally bid farewell to the dead with the sentence engraved on Jewish tombstones: „May your souls be bound up in the bond of life”.
Rabbi Meir Chaim Gestetner (Autonomous Orthodox Israelite Community in Hungary) said in reference to medieval Jewish philosopher Maimonides that the Jewish people can have two types of enemies: one who attacks them with arms, and the other who seeks to drive them off the path of laws. We therefore „best preserve the memory of martyrs by carrying on religious orthodox Jewish life in Hungary”, he said.
Catholic Bishop László Bíró, Hungary’s Military Ordinariate stressed: the threat of ideologies is that they tear us away from reality, turn against man, and crush human relations. „By virtue of their very anonymity, these nameless brothers of ours remind us of many who were driven to death by confused ideologies”, he said. He also reiterated that the lives of many are being extinguished in a number of places around the world also at present in the name of ideologies which have hijacked religions, but at the very core of which one finds nothing but common human egotism and selfishness, arms dealing or the desire for an unfair share of the world’s riches.
Reformed Church Bishop István Bogárdi Szabó, Parish President of the Synod of the Hungarian Reformed Church said that a funeral is a time for mourning, remembrance and hope all at the same time. „We always bury the dead with faith in the Lord of life and by trusting in his promise that death shall be conquered”, he said. „A resting place on earth always indicates our mortality, but also indicates that this here is the parlour of salvation”, he pointed out.
The funeral organised by Mazsihisz and the Institute for National Heritage in the Jewish faith was attended by Holocaust survivors, Chief Rabbi Róbert Frölich (Mazsihisz), Slomó Köves, Executive Rabbi of the Unified Hungarian Jewish Congregation, Mrs Radnainé, Katalin Fogarasi, Chair of the Institute for National Heritage, Zoltán Lomnici, President of the Council of Human Dignity, public figures and representatives of the diplomatic corps.
The human remains now interred were found by workers in 2011 during the refurbishment of the bridge. The bones were examined in the Forensic Expert and Research Institute, and the investigation ascertained that the remains found included both the remains of Jewish victims shot into the Danube by the Arrow Cross during the Holocaust and those of non-Jewish people.
(MTI)
