Jewish groups struggle for Holocaust restitution; as Hungarian Leader wants a list of names.

Associated Press – American lawyer and IPRC (Immovable Property Review Conference) co-chairman Stuart E. Eizenstat talks to journalists in Prague, on Wednesday, Nov. 28, 2012.

PRAGUE (AP) — More than 67 years after the Holocaust, Jirina Novakova refuses to give up her battle to regain property confiscated from her family.

Her hopes got a boost two years ago when 43 countries vowed at a Prague conference to back global guidelines for the restitution of property confiscated from Jews during World War II to their rightful owners or heirs. The nations pledged to try harder to return real estate stolen by the Nazis, open archives that might help those dispossessed and to process claims for restitution faster. She thought that show of international determination would pressure her country, the Czech Republic, and help her finally win a court battle to get back a button factory seized from her family by the Nazis.

But the 62-year-old is still waiting.      

This week, Novakova was among 200 people from 41 countries attending another international conference in Prague to review the progress made and put renewed pressure on European governments to restitute such property or provide fair compensation.

The two-day conference in Prague ended Wednesday with new calls for restitution.

“While progress has taken place since the fall of Communism and the subsequent breakup of the Soviet Union, there remains an urgent need to help the tens of thousands of elderly Holocaust victims and their heirs whose property claims remain unsatisfied,” Ronald Lauder, president of the World Jewish Restitution Organization, said in a statement.

Hungarian Leader Asks His Government for a List of Jews

With the conflict in Gaza at a tenuous point, a Holocaust-denying Hungarian lawmaker thought the next logical thing to do would be to ask the government to draw up a list of Jews who pose a national security threat. Because, really, what could go wrong with that?

“I think such a conflict makes it timely to tally up people of Jewish ancestry who live here, especially in the Hungarian Parliament and the Hungarian government, who, indeed, pose a national security risk to Hungary,”  Márton Gyöngyösi, deputy group leader of the radical-nationalist party, told Hungarian parliament yesterday. Which of course sounds an awful lot like Hitler in the Holocaust, when he said that Jewish people were the biggest enemy of the German people, often referring to Jewish people as the “Jewish Enemy.” Gyöngyösi, according to Politics.hu, a self-described Hungarian non-partisan daily, is sort of into sounding a lot like a Nazi apologist — as in July, when he lashed out at the idea of investigators searching for Nazi war criminals in Hungary, and in January, when he was accused of being one of those whackadoodles who believes the Holocaust did not exist.

Needless to say, that did not go over well, as Reuters points out that 500,000-600,000 Hungarian Jews died in the Holocaust. And Politics.Hu reports that Gyöngyösi’s latest comments came on the day before a “major conference on hate speech organized by the Council of Europe was scheduled to open in Budapest” where billionaire George Soros will be speaking.

“The government strictly rejects extremist, racist, anti-Semitic voices of any kind and does everything to suppress such voices,” the Hungarian government’s spokesman said in the Reuters report, apologizing for Gyöngyösi .

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