Hungarian Conservative

For reasons unknown, the Facebook page of the Hungarian pro-Israel news website Neokohn.hu was banned by Meta on Sunday. EMIH Chief Rabbi Slomó Köves’ page was also removed. Both pages have since been restored, but the incidents are quite troubling, considering the that the bans appear to have had no basis whatsoever.

Gábor Deutsch, the staunchly anti-communist Chief Rabbi of Devecser, wrote a study on Judaism and Bolshevism published in 1937 in which his aim was ‘to prove, point by point, that the classical revelations of the Jewish religious ethos, the Scriptures and the Talmud are opposed sharply to the basic doctrines of Bolshevism’. On 4 July 1944 he was transported to Auschwitz, from where he never returned.

While in recent weeks Europe was shocked by a series of violent antisemitic protests sparked by the events in the Middle East, the ones in Dagestan, Russia stand out, as they echo the dark history of pogroms.

In an interview with Hungarian news website Index, Mazsihisz Chief Rabbi Róbert Frölich declared that Budapest and Hungary as a whole are ‘an island of peace’ for the Jewish community.