Jerusalem-The Simon Wiesenthal Center today issued a statement of support for the strong protest by the leadership of the Hungariannon-Orthodox Jewish comunities (Mazsihisz) against efforts by the Veritas Institute established by the Hungarian government to falsify the narrative of the Holocaust in Hungary and attempt tohide 
the important role played by locals in the mass murder of Hungarian Jewry.
In a statement issued here today by its Israel director, Holocaust historian Dr. Efraim Zuroff, the Center expressed its strong opposition tothe recent statement by Veritas Institute director Sandor Szakaly (pictured), who referred to the summer 1941 deportation of about 16,000-18,000 Jews from Hungary to Kamenetz-Podolsk inGerman-occupied Ukraine, where the overwhelming majority were murdered, as a "police action against aliens," when in reality it was clearly a crime against humanity and the initial massacre ofthe Holocaust of Hungarian Jewry. The Center also expressed support for the call by Mazsihisz to all politicians to refrain from using the 70th anniversary of the mass deportations of HungarianJewry to Auschwitz in the upcoming elections and for a halt to falsifying the past in a disrespectful manner which will destroy the credibility of the events scheduled during 2014 to mark thetragedy.
According to Zuroff:
"The recent attempts to rewrite the history of the Holocaust, which have become extremely common in post-Communist Eastern Europe, andespecially in Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Hungary, Romania, and Croatia are an insult to the memory of the victims of the Nazis and their numerous local volunteer collaborators, as well as tothose who fought to save Europe from Nazism. The fact that all these countries are currently members of the European Union should be an embarassment to Brussels, but in the meantime, almostnothing is being done by the EU to stop the rewriting of the accepted narrative of the World War II and the Holocaust. A failure to do so, will doom Europe to a resurgence of fascism, along witha rise in xenophobia, racism, hate crimes and anti-Semitism."
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The Simon Wiesenthal Center is one of the largest international Jewish human rights organizations with over 400,000 member families in theUnited States. It is an NGO at international agencies including the United Nations, UNESCO, the OSCE, the OAS, the Council of Europe and the Latin American Parliament (Parlatino).
