Hungary commemorates 1945 liberation of Budapest ghetto
Source: AP
By PABLO GORONDI
BUDAPEST, Hungary (AP) — Hungary’s Jewish community on Sunday commemorated the 75th anniversary of the liberation by Soviet troops of the Budapest ghetto, where over 70,000 Jews were confined near the end of World War II.
While some 550,000 Hungarian Jews were killed during the Holocaust in Nazi-run death camps, in forced labor battalions or by the Nazis’ Hungarian allies, many Budapest Jews survived the war. Many were forced into the ghetto, others hid around the city under assumed identities or were helped by sympathetic foreign diplomats like Sweden’s Raoul Wallenberg.
Hundreds of people attended the commemoration at Budapest’s Dohany Street Synagogue, the largest in Europe, including Holocaust survivors, diplomats and politicians.
Robert Frolich, the synagogue’s chief rabbi, spoke of “ambivalent feelings” surrounding the commemoration, which contains pain and mourning, but also the “celebration of life.”
People attend a ceremony that commemorates the 75th anniversary of the liberation of the Budapest Jewish ghetto in Dohany Street Synagogue in Budapest, Hungary, Sunday, Jan. 19, 2020. The ghetto was liberated by the Soviet Red Army during World War II on January 17, 1945. (Tibor Illyes/MTI via AP)
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