Csanad Szegedi was a conflicted man.

Szegedi, at 28, was a rising star in Hungarian and European politics. The Jobbik (Yo-bick) Party he had founded as a university student eight years earlier, in October 2003, now held 47 seats in Hungary’s parliament — about a 12-percent share — and three of Hungary’s allotted 22 seats, including his own, in the European Parliament.

Szegedi was telegenic, brash, articulate, and convincing in expounding the extreme right-wing views that were his mother’s milk. The Jobbik Party, like most of Europe’s neofascist parties, is fertile breeding ground for anti-Semites and Holocaust doubters, and Szegedi fit right in.

Politics being the sordid business that it is means that some rival is always trying to undermine the top banana and knock him off of his perch. Szegedi would soon fall victim to this game.

An old party foe met with Szegedi and threatened him. “You are a Jew,” said the foe, “and there are documents that can prove this.”

Calling Szegedi a Jew was not unusual. It was normal political-speak for one Jobbik to accuse another of being Jewish. Europeans often use the word “Jew” as a pejorative term in describing a rival, both in politics and in sports.

The supposed documents were a different story entirely. But when the party rival declined to produce them, Szegedi dismissed him and shrugged off the rumors.

“In an ultra-right wing party, it is not a plus to be Jewish,” says Szegedi, seated across from me in the home of Budapest’s rosh beis din, Rabbi Boruch Oberlander, who is Szegedi’s rabbi and our interpreter.

Still, Szegedi had a nagging suspicion that wouldn’t go away. He decided to get to the bottom of it. His investigations began on December 25, 2011, with his then 91-year-old maternal grandmother inMiskolc, her home and Szegedi’s birthplace. That talk was the first of a four-stage process in Szegedi’s personal transformation.

“We had a long conversation,” recalls Szegedi, who, except for absentmindedly bending the business card that I handed him, seems quite at ease. “My grandmother said that the people she grew up with — her adoptive parents — were Jewish and the Nazis deported them in World War II. I never asked her if she herself was deported and she didn’t volunteer the information.”

While her maiden name of Klein should have been a dead giveaway, she insisted the name came from the above-mentioned Jewish family who adopted her after her mother passed away.

“So from my point of view, I began to understand where the gossip about me came from,” says Szegedi. “People mistakenly took her adoptive parents to be her parents, but they really weren’t. As far as I was concerned the case was closed.”

Leaking the Secret

Szegedi may have been satisfied with his grandmother’s explanation, but the rumors persisted, dogging him at every step.

In April 2012, four months after his Xmas day visit, Szegedi paid another visit to his elderly grandmother, stage two in his discovery process. This time his grandmother was more candid. She admitted that her adoptive father, Mr. Klein, was her mother’s brother.

“I started connecting the dots,” said Szegedi. “While she still didn’t say she was Jewish, I knew that if her uncle was Jewish, then her mother had to have been Jewish and that meant she was Jewish. So I asked her, if your adopted parents were deported because they were Jewish, weren’t you also deported? She said yes. I was so shocked by this simple answer, because it meant that she had experienced a great tragedy in her life. I was afraid she would start crying or her blood pressure would go up, so I decided it would be better not to ask any more questions.”

Even if Szegedi, at this stage, was satisfied with partial answers, his political rivals were still hot on his trail, and there was a paper trail as well.

From 1895 to 1950, all Hungarian official documents recorded a citizen’s religion. In addition, Szegedi’s grandparents chose to marry in an Orthodox ceremony in 1946, out of respect for their parents, but subsequently decided to stop practicing Judaism or even admitting they were Jewish. This was typical for many Hungarian Jews, who exited the ravages of the Holocaust only to enter the orbit of the Soviet Union, who suppressed religious observance.

However, Szegedi’s grandfather passed the family secret down one generation when he told his daughter (Csanad Szegedi’s mother) when she was a teenager that she was Jewish, also swearing her to secrecy.

Csanad’s mother married a non-Jew who was open to anti-Semitic ideas. So while he knew he was marrying a Jewess, he assumed she wasn’t Jewish anymore because she was nonpracticing.

Self-Discovery

By now, it was clear to Csanad Szegedi, leader of the Hungarian ultra-right, that he was a Jew. He consulted a fellow Jobbik leader whom he trusted. The advice he got was to just keep things quiet and maybe the rumors would blow over.

A few weeks later, they blew up, not over.

In June 2012, documents showing that his grandmother was born Jewish went viral on an ultra-right-wing website.

It was time for another visit to Miskolc — stage three in the self-discovery process.

“I realized I had to clarify a lot of things for myself,” says Szegedi. “I asked her where she’d been deported to. She said Auschwitz. That’s when she showed me the number on her arm for the first time. She always wore long sleeves, even in the summer. It didn’t really occur to me that this was something out of the ordinary.”

Szegedi said his grandmother didn’t cry during their conversation, as he feared she might, and she even spoke without emotion. “Looking back, I was more affected by it than she was. It was a big shock, because I now had to face a lot of things I never believed before. If I had heard her story from anyone else, I would have thought it was Holocaust propaganda. But this was my own grandmother telling it.”

As their conversation progressed, his grandmother related that she had relatives in Budapest who committed suicide to avoid deportation. “The irony is the Jews of Budapest were never deported,” said Szegedi, who was beginning to learn that Holocaust memories are an indelible part of the Jewish experience. “But these stories, that other Jews have a whole lifetime to digest, I had to digest in a very short period of time.”

A year has now passed since the news broke. As we sit together in Budapest, Szegedi is quite matter-of-fact about his tale as he looks back, although this is the first occasion on which he has fully related it to the media. Until now Szegedi has only given two short interviews — one to the Christian Broadcasting Network and another to a local, liberal Budapest magazine. In the ensuing year, he has clearly taken the time to think matters through carefully. Even though he has one foot out the political door, he retains the politician’s “gift of gab.”

His trademark goatee is gone, and the brash bluster has been replaced with words of Torah that he has begun to learn and sprinkles into the conversation.

But back in July 2012, when the revelations were still fresh newsprint, the world was closing in on him. “Just imagine — Csanad Szegedi, the head of an anti-Semitic party, is Jewish,” he says. “Suddenly a lot of things changed around me, and inside of me. I’d always considered myself Hungarian and now I found out I was Jewish. Can you be both Hungarian and Jewish at the same time?”

One of Szegedi’s first challenges was dealing with the political earthquake that shook the ground from under him. For many party leaders, it was a simple equation. You might be able to be Hungarian and Jewish, but you cannot be Jewish and be a Jobbik.

However, politics is a game of unusual calculations. Party leader Gabor Vona thought that Szegedi’s Jewishness could give the Jobbiks a much-needed dose of political rectitude. They felt that Szegedi, with his Holocaust-survivor-grandmother, could be the perfect poster boy to prove they weren’t anti-Semitic.

“Gabor Vona told me, ‘From now on, you will be the party’s shield.’$$$SEPARATE QUOTES$$$” The cool political calculations left Szegedi feeling raw and rejected. “Inside of me, all of these stories from my grandmother were disturbing and painful. Just at this point, when I was also starting to feel a sense of belonging to the Jews, I was struck by the contrast that I no longer belonged to my party. Suddenly, all the work I had done for the party didn’t mean anything anymore. My sole value to them was the fact that they could use me as a Jew.”

Texting 1, 2, 3

The fourth and final stage of Szegedi remaking himself occurred on July 30, 2012, when he formally announced he was quitting the Jobbik party.

He called a friend, an editor at a local newspaper, and asked him for contact information for Rabbi Shlomo Koves, the Chabad executive rabbi of the Unified Hungarian Jewish Congregation (EMIH). The Hungarian-born Rabbi Koves has become a leading spokesman for Hungarian Jewry, representing the community in the media and before government officials.

Szegedi sent Rabbi Koves a text message, saying he wanted to meet with him.

“I had seen him on television. I saw that he was young and sincere and that’s why I came to him,” says Szegedi. “But it was a totally impulsive move. I’m not sure today that I could have done it again, if I had to do it over.”

It’s also not like Szegedi grew up with such a strong connection to religion that he would feel comfortable contacting a clergyman.

“Nationalism was my religion,” says Szegedi, who attended a university affiliated with the Reformed Church in Hungary, a Calvinist church. “My parents never baptized me; they said when you grow up you’ll decide on your own. I may have felt some connection to G-d when we sang the Psalms, but then I got into politics, and religion faded into the background. I just knew that now I wanted to talk about Judaism with an authentic Jew. If it was only the Holocaust that interested me, I could have gone to the Holocaust Museum, but if I wanted to know the spiritual part of Judaism, then only an authentic rabbi who practices his religion could help.”

When Rabbi Koves received the text message, he called Rabbi Oberlander. “I just got a text message from Csanad Szegedi and he wants to meet with me.”

Rabbi Oberlander says his first reaction was one of incredulity.

“Boruch, I promise you he wants to meet me,” Rabbi Koves said to Rabbi Oberlander. “What should we do?’

Rabbi Oberlander recalls this momentous day, as I sit at his dining room table an hour before Csanad Szegedi was to join our conversation. “We couldn’t help but thinking someone might be playing a joke on us, or that maybe it was even some form of provocation.”

After a brief discussion, the two rabbis concluded that one of their staffers would call Szegedi and invite him for a meeting. The appointment was set at Keren Ohr, the local Chabad headquarters on Budapest’s Karoly Boulevard. It was peak tourism season, and Keren Ohr was swarming with Israelis — when in walked Szegedi.

“I heard many people speaking Hebrew and some people there had beards,” said Szegedi. “I felt very strange, but I thought to myself if I came this far, I might as well follow through.”

Szegedi remembers Rabbi Koves’s greeting. “He was very friendly, but reserved.

“I then told him that I would like to apologize for everything that I did against Judaism, all the speeches that I gave and everything that I did against the Hungarian Jews,” says Szegedi. “I also told him that I had quit the Jobbik party, that I would like to start a new life and that I’d like to get to know Judaism. But in the back of my mind, I didn’t really think I would meet him again very soon.”

And Rabbi Koves’s reaction?

“I was a little shocked,” says Rabbi Koves, in a telephone conversation prior to my visit to Budapest. “I told him I accept the fact that he says he is sorry, but he can’t just say I’m sorry to me. He must reach the hearts and get forgiveness from the people. On the other hand, as a Jew, he was now obligated to study and find out what that means.”

Rabbi Koves gave Szegedi a few Jewish books to take home with him, but before they parted company, he offered Szegedi a slot in the upcoming summer session of the Open University for Jewish Studies. Szegedi asked if he could bring his wife Krisztina even though she isn’t Jewish. His request was granted.

Szegedi credits his wife for her unstinting support throughout the entire episode. “She really had compassion on me. She knew how hard I had worked for the Jobbik and resented the fact that they were so ungrateful at the end. On the other hand, she was very happy that we could start a new life. I think all politicians’ wives hate politics. In life, there is nothing that ruins so many families as much as politics. So she cried from one eye, but her other eye was very happy. She was the only one I told I was going to meet Rabbi Koves. She said, ‘You always had the right instincts, and I’m behind you.’

Paving the Path

Now that Szegedi was attending Jewish functions, it was time to prepare the community for the subsequent tumult.

Besides reopening the old and deep scars of the Holocaust, the Szegedi cased sparked vocal debate on contemporary issues. Should Csanad Szegedi — a man who represented everything the Jewish community fears in 21^st-century Europe — be accepted as a member in good standing in the Jewish community, despite his tarnished past?

Before answering that question, it bears asking if Szegedi harmed the Jewish community during his years as head of an anti-Semitic party.

While the official Jobbik political platform avoids overt anti-Semitic messages, it is clear where its sentiments lie. Party chairman Gabor Vona once invited observers from Iran’s Revolutionary Guard to oversee the fairness of local elections.

And while Holocaust denial in Hungary is a crime punishable by imprisonment, as it is in many European countries, there is a big difference between violating the letter of the law and the spirit of the law. So while you can’t deny the Holocaust, you can raise doubts, as the Jobbiks do, as to whether 6 million Jews were really killed. Jobbik vice-chairman Levente Muranyi said he had no problem being called a “Nazi, a fascist, an anti-Semite, if that is what is necessary to represent what he called ‘true Hungarian’ interest.” Jobbik website propaganda accuses Jews of colonizing Hungary and of crucifying “J.” and being proud of it.

“I don’t know if Szegedi caused harm in a personal way, but the Jobbiks are the ones that made anti-Semitic rhetoric and speech acceptable in Hungary in the last few years, and in that sense he – as a leading party figure – is totally responsible,” says Rabbi Koves, in retracing his dilemma over giving Szegedi a chance. “Szegedi was second in command and was considered the party ‘strongman.’ It’s not like he was giving speeches every day about the Jews, but he definitely made a few comments. So it’s not just a question of what he did personally, but his responsibility for building up this whole party, which did tremendous harm to other minorities as well. L’havdil, it’s like if Abu Mazen were to find out he’s Jewish. Maybe he didn’t kill Jews himself, but he holds a major responsibility for the sentiments of his people.”

Once the news initially broke that Csanad Szegedi was a Jew, Rabbi Oberlander began researching the halachah to see how it applied to such an extraordinary case.

The question Rabbi Oberlander mulled, first from a theoretical point of view, was whether someone who fights against and besmirches the Jewish People, or puts them in danger, could still be considered Jewish.

On a Tuesday, Rabbi Oberlander announced to the community that this topic would be the subject of his upcoming special Friday night shiur in Budapest’s Chabad Vasvari synagogue; an address that drew many more people than usual due to the swirling controversy. Rabbi Oberlander says on the day he announced the topic, his own opinion was not yet firmed up.

“In the beginning, I fought with my own conscience, but I understood that this was an issue to be determined by halachah,” says Rabbi Oberlander, who also served as interpreter for our conversation with Szegedi. “I figured he could be defined as a moser [informer] or a meshumad [apostate]; but a moser can also do teshuvah; he doesn’t lose his Jewish status according to halachah. The Rema in Choshen Mishpat (34:22) says if a meshumad wants to become frum again he can right away (miyad) be a kosher witness.”

While Rabbi Oberlander began his research from a theoretical point of view — before Szegedi had texted Rabbi Koves and met with him — the theoretical quickly morphed into the practical. The Open University session was about to begin — the first time that Szegedi would confront and be confronted with members of the Jewish community. Rabbi Oberlander published his psak in a Hungarian translation and within hours, it was downloaded by more than 5,000 curious Jews.

The Air Froze

The stage was set. The first Open University session was scheduled to begin at 2 p.m. Szegedi was asked to come a half hour later, enough time to prep the rest of the 50 attendees for the potentially explosive encounter.

“Rabbi Koves was giving the first lesson that day,” says Rabbi Oberlander. “So I waited downstairs for our guests. They arrived 15 minutes late. I greeted them. Trying to act as natural as possible, I give Csanad a yarmulke, and he looks at it, and asks, ‘What do I do with it?’

“Maybe he wanted to know if he had to say a blessing on it. In any case, he put it on, went upstairs, and sat down. I must say the people were very polite, other than giving him some glances,” adds Rabbi Oberlander.

Now that he learned what to do with a yarmulke, Szegedi’s second lesson of the day came toward the end of the session at 7:30 p.m., at Minchah time. Since most of the attendees are new to Judaism, the rabbis gave a crash course in prayer and synagogue etiquette and explained how to use the special prayer books that contains the Hebrew text, a Hungarian translation and a phonetic transliteration of the Hebrew.

Rabbi Oberlander kept a special eye on Szegedi. “He listened as we called out the page numbers, followed instructions and davened.”

A third lesson, and the first big test in community relations, came later in the two-week session, in an open forum called “Ask the Rabbi.” Szegedi asked about a controversial statement Israeli president Shimon Peres had made at a November 2007 economic forum in Israel, when he expressed the success of Israel’s integration into the international investment community by boasting that Israelis are “buying Manhattan, Hungary, Romania, and Poland.”

Peres was roundly criticized for the comment that played right into the hands of ultranationalist parties like the Jobbik, who cited it as an example of Jews’ intentions to dominate the global economy.

“The air froze,” said Rabbi Oberlander, “but we just explained it to him in simple business terms and left it at that.”

That Friday night, Szegedi attended Kabbalas Shabbos prayers at Vasvari. “Besides one or two people running out of the shul in protest, he sat in his place, and there were no incidents,” reported Rabbi Oberlander.

The next Friday night, like any typical Jew, Szegedi decided to try a different shul, the Obuda shul, where Rabbi Koves presides. Rabbi Koves had briefed the congregants beforehand: “Please try to accept that someone is coming who until now was on the other side, but he’s not a spy, he belongs to us now.”

“When he entered the shul it was a like a UFO had landed,” says Yitzchak Gyorfi, an Obuda congregant. “Nobody actually sat down next to him, but slowly people got closer. We always have a Kiddush after Kabbalas Shabbos. He sat down and some of the braver ones sat down next to him and started to communicate with him.”

Szegedi recalls: “One person came over to me right away and showed me the page where they were praying. Others glanced at me like, What is he doing here? A psychologist could probably write a very long article about it. The Jewish community is very diverse. I think everybody understood rationally what had happened with me, but for some, their emotions took over.”

Szegedi has since become a regular member in shul, and has forged friendships with lots of the people, but passions are still running high in the Jewish community, even a year later. Zsuzsa Szilank, a member of Rabbi Koves’s Obuda synagogue, expressed one prevailing sentiment.

“I understand how a rabbi could look at it differently, and say someone who doesn’t keep Shabbos is worse than being a Holocaust denier,” said Szilank. “What he [Szegedi] is doing with his Yiddishkeit and how much he is going to become shomer mitzvos is between him and Hashem. I accept him as person and as a Jew, and so do other people in the community, but I cannot understand or comprehend that a person today would deny that millions of people were gassed and murdered. I’m not saying I can never forgive. I just can’t comprehend it.”

Another longstanding, young, Torah-observant congregant at the Vasvari shul who asked not to be identified told Mishpacha that he felt a certain revulsion when Szegedi came in and stood right next to him. “I moved away to the furthest possible place in the shul. The fact that yesterday this man was publicly agitating against Jews and now he’s trying become a member of a Jewish community was so disturbing that I was not able to concentrate on davening anymore.”

What would Csanad Szegedi have to do to prove himself to this congregant?

“Can someone who once felt such hatred towards a nation, can he completely change and become a righteous man? I doubt that such change is possible. Perhaps only the subject of the hatred will change, but the person remains as vicious as he was. I don’t think my doubts will ever disappear, and even if they will, it will take many years.”

The suspicions and concerns surrounding Szegedi’s sincerity are question marks that Rabbi Oberlander will have to grapple with for some time to come.

Another question he fields, and one he even considered originally, was whether he and Rabbi Koves should have waited a few months and tested the waters a bit more to see if Szegedi was sincere, rather than accepting him right away.

“This is a matter of halachah, not what the best policy should be,” responded Rabbi Oberlander. “The question over whether you have to tell someone to come back in six months before I will talk with him is a halachic sheilah. If he is Jewish, you don’t have the right to put it off for even one day. If that gave us a PR problem, that’s fine, and if I tried to teach him Judaism and it didn’t take, that’s one matter, but halachah doesn’t take PR into account.”

Has he ever probed Szegedi for any signs that he might slip back to his past?

“Indirectly, yes,” says Rabbi Oberlander. “He told me that once he got to the point where he felt what it meant to be ostracized, he said he could never do it again to somebody else.”

Hate is Bad

Szegedi himself insists he has turned his back on the past. He fasted last Yom Kippur, when Rabbi Oberlander honored him by asking him to open the aron kodesh toward the end of the Kol Nidre service. “Once the meaning of Yom Kippur was explained to me, I was really looking forward to it as a point where I could both turn inward and clear up my connection with Hashem. The second I opened the aron kodesh, I felt I was getting out of quarantine for having held the ultra-right political opinions and for my own shortsightedness.”

Rabbi Oberlander began learning with Szegedi every Friday afternoon for two hours, studies that included the weekly Torah reading, how to pray in Hebrew, how to put on tefillin and how to eat kosher. He also decided to take on the Hebrew name Dovid, after his grandfather.

Szegedi expressed curiosity about what G-d means to the Jewish People and what the Jewish People mean to G-d.

The topic of prejudice and hate arose twice, once when Szegedi asked about passages in the Talmud that some non-Jews have misinterpreted as examples of Jewish prejudice toward non-Jews. “I explained that nowhere in halachah does it say any bad things about non-Jews,” says Rabbi Oberlander. “It hasn’t been easy. He came from a totally different background. Not only did he have no knowledge, but he had to get over his negative knowledge.”

The second time was during the course of a more general discussion.

“I explained to him that you can disagree and disagree very strongly but there is no reason for hate. It’s a bad middah and there is no reason for a human to hate another person.”

Szegedi then asked Rabbi Oberlander how he would characterize the Jews’ feelings for the Arabs.

“I told him, ‘It might surprise you if I told you they don’t hate the Arabs in Israel,’$$$SEPARATE QUOTES$$$” explained Rabbi Oberlander. “There are no laws that discriminate against Arabs. What Israel practices is self-defense. If you think somebody needs to be stopped and checked, you do that, but you don’t hate him.”

Tears at the Wall

Szegedi saw this firsthand, on his maiden voyage to Israel, last December. Coincidentally, Rabbi Oberlander happened to be on the same flight. The two found themselves on adjacent lines at passport control, where the border patrol guard began to question Szegedi. He was nervous that they might turn him back at the border because of his notoriety, despite his diplomatic passport as a member of the EU parliament.

Finally, the clerk asked him: “Are you Jewish?”

Szegedi answered yes, pointing to Rabbi Oberlander on the adjacent line. “And that’s my rabbi.”

“He was proud,” said Rabbi Oberlander. “It was the first time he publicly identified himself verbally as a Jew.”

One of Szegedi’s stops in Jerusalem was at Yad Vashem, which has headsets with simultaneous translations for audio-visual presentations. Since Hungarian is not one of the translations provided, Rabbi Oberlander served as his translator, until they began viewing an old World War II Nazi propaganda film. “I don’t need the translation,” Szegedi told Rabbi Oberlander. “I know this stuff better than you.”

Shortly after, another museum visitor came striding up to him. “Are you Csanad Szegedi?” he asked.

“Yes,” Szegedi replied.

“I’m a Hungarian who now lives in Ecuador. I know all about you. You’re a brave man for what you did. I admire you.”

Szegedi also got a dose of chizuk when he visited the Kosel. As is customary, Rabbi Shmuel Rabinowitz, the rav of the Kosel, escorted Szegedi, as he does with all diplomatic visitors to the Western Wall.

Rabbi Rabinowitz, sensing this was something special, asked Rabbi Oberlander, in Yiddish, what message he should give over.

In less than 30 seconds, Rabbi Oberlander relayed Szegedi’s story, careful not to mention his anti-Semitic background or any words that Szegedi might be able to pick up.

“Rabbi Rabinowitz understood and gave him a warm welcome, saying, ‘You’re doing great things and you’re welcome to the Jewish People.’ It gave him a lot of chizuk,” says Rabbi Oberlander, who then waited patiently as Szegedi lingered at the Kosel for more than 15 minutes, praying with tefillin and wiping away tears.

Szegedi was ticketed for a second trip to Israel over Succos. But before his return to the Mideast, he had one more circle to close back home.

Once he learned that his great-grandmother’s gravesite was just two miles away from his grandmother’s house, Szegedi trekked to the cemetery and found the gravesite in a state of disrepair. He committed to oversee its renovation, and then brought his grandmother back to the silent reminder of her past.

There in the cemetery, the elderly woman took out a siddur and prayed — perhaps for the first time in more than 60 years. And her grandson, once estranged from Judaism but now committed to return, prayed alongside her.

Radical Appeal: Inside the Jobbik Mind with Csanad Szegedi

What initially attracted you to the ultra-right?

“First of all, I picked it up through my family and education. My father is a right-wing thinker. My mother is also a conservative. Family values were important for us, versus the liberal way of thinking. So when I came to Budapest to study in university in 2001, I got to know the people whom I eventually banded with to form the Jobbik Party. We all felt we had to establish our own right-wing party that would be radical, and very vocal.”

What is so attractive about ultra-right political philosophy? How do they think it will make life better for the average person?

“A lot of Hungarians feel there are a lot of taboo topics that even in the 20 years since Communism fell are still left unspoken. For me personally, what meant the most was the Treaty of Trianon [the 1920 peace agreement ending World War I] where Hungary lost two-thirds of its territory. There are also the issues of unemployment, crime, law and order, and obviously, anti-Semitism, which always arises in the ultra-right way of thinking.”

In the 2011 census, less than 11,000 Hungarians say they are Jewish out of a total population of almost 10 million. Why then are they targeted by the ultra-right?

“The ultra-right doesn’t consider that there aren’t all that many Jews, because realistically speaking, there may be as many as 100,000 Jews in Hungary. A lot of Jews just keep it secret — for example, my grandmother. The ultra-right fears that all of the new apartment projects under construction are owned by Jews and being built for Jews who will come back to live in Hungary and swell the Jewish population to half a million. But this didn’t start just now. There are anti-Semitic traditions going back to the blood libels of centuries ago. Somebody who doesn’t understand Jews and Judaism could let their imaginations run away with them and start connecting dots that have no real connection — for example, blaming the Jews for the Trianon treaty.

“A lot of people think that Hungary’s bad economy is very good for the Jews, because if they’re coming here, prices of real estate will go down and the Jews could buy in cheaper.”

[At this point, Rabbi Oberlander interjects, in jest: “You don’t give this over with the same passion you used to!”

Szegedi turns back to me and says: “If I had granted this interview to you a year ago, I would have thought the whole interview is a guise and that you’re here to buy a project.”

I reply: “I’ve heard Budapest is a good investment … if I only had the money…” —Ed.]

How does the Middle East and the Palestinian and Muslim question fit into the equation?

“You have to add that into the mix. There is also the Arab propaganda that Palestinians are being killed mercilessly by Israeli soldiers, and I have to add that obviously, nobody ever mentions that the Palestinians use their own children as living shields. So the ultra-right says if the Israelis keep coming here, they will do the same things here to Hungarians. In 2006, there were widespread street demonstrations here. It was an accepted fact by the radical right that the demonstrations weren’t put down by Hungarian police but by Israeli soldiers dressed as police.”

Do they really believe this?

“Yes.”

Do you ever fear for your life, that one of your former political allies will try to harm you because you are Jewish?

“No.”

Why did you keep your seat in the EU parliament even though you left the Jobbiks?

“When the question was raised about giving back my mandate, I consulted my rabbis. They suggested that I should keep it, because if I resigned, the Jobbiks would fill my spot with a real Jobbik member. So at this point, I have remained as an independent member of the European Parliament.”

What’s your position on the proposed EU boycott of West Bank and Golan products?

“I voted against the boycott, but I am sorry to say that a lot of members of the EU parliament are of Jewish descent and a lot of the time, they vote against the interests of Israel. Unfortunately, those are the facts.”

Do you think the ultra-right parties like the Jobbik should be treated as nuisances or as threats?

“After World War II, nothing should be ignored. I really think it should be taken as a very serious threat, and if the Jews do take it seriously, then I don’t think it’s going to be a hard threat to tackle.”

Why?

“Let’s talk about the Hungarian hard-core ultra-right. They are few in number; maybe there are about 15,000 to 20,000 hard-core, anti-Semitic, radical right-wingers, but this small group affects how far the rest can go. If you can block or diminish their effect, then the Jewish People could get to a point where they can help the Hungarian people understand what the Jewish People are all about.”

Where are they holding now?

“It’s a paradox. Average Hungarians are actually proud of their Jewish writers, scientists, and inventors, like Edward Teller. We have seven Jewish Nobel Prize winners. When Hungarians mention the Jewish Nobel winners, they consider these Jews to be fellow Hungarians, but when they talk about the Holocaust, then it only happened to the Jews and they’re not Hungarians any more. The tragedy of the Holocaust is not really considered a Hungarian national tragedy and the locals largely don’t acknowledge the role Hungarians played in deporting the Jews.”

Is this a sentiment that can realistically be changed?

“People would have to understand that these people were Hungarians as well as Jews, and that the Jewish People have a lot in common with them and that their fates were much intertwined. There is more in common between Jews and Europeans than what divides them, such as managing globalization and belief in one G-d, utilizing technological inventions for the betterment of mankind.

“But Jewish people have also made very big mistakes with trying to hide their own identities. It should be very clear that assimilation is not good for anybody. Relinquishing your own identity is not good for anybody, and certainly not good for the Jews. My favorite story from the Torah is when Hashem sent the spies to Canaan. With the exception of two of them, they came back and said, ‘We can’t go in.’ That’s when you could see the narrow-mindedness of the Jewish spies, who didn’t have full belief in Hashem.

“There is a full covenant between the Jews and Hashem. A lot of Jews try to ignore it, as if it doesn’t exist, yet it does. Really, the Jewish People don’t have to figure out and invent complicated explanations. They just have to give over who they really are.”

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 477)