A Hungarian Winery and the Fate of Jewish Property after the Holocaust

Hungary’s Royal Tokaji winery is one of that country’s best known and most highly regarded. Last month, after a year of negotiations, its owners installed two plaques honoring the Jewish Zimmerman family, who owned it from the 19th century until World War II. The Zimmermans’ story, writes Dorottya Czuk, tells much about how the Hungarian Communist government prevented Jews from reclaiming their property after the Holocaust:

In Hungary, there are still quite a lot of people who feel uncomfortable talking about how they “became owners” of certain things after World War II. The Hungarian state robbed its citizens twice: before and after 1945. The Office of the Commissioner of Abandoned Properties was established in 1945.

“This authority was a very disgusting and horrifying feature of the post-Holocaust Communist system,” explains László Karsai, a historian of the Holocaust in Hungary. He claims that lawmakers formed the organization so that properties stolen from Hungarian Jews could officially be nationalized. . . . [A]fter 1990 only partial compensation has been carried out. . . .

There’s a Hungarian joke: “Communism is a system where anti-Jewish laws apply to everyone.” Honestly discussing the role of Jews in Hungary’s economy and their place in society is a sensitive matter even today. No plaques explain the contribution of Jews to Hungary’s economy. Their properties were once enormously valuable, yet almost nobody has received anything near the value of what they lost. But thousands of buildings in the Hungarian countryside remain silent witnesses to the murdered Jews.

Read more at Tablet

More about: Communism, History & Ideas, Holocaust, Holocaust restitution, Hungarian Jewry, Hungary

What a Strategic Victory in Gaza Can and Can’t Achieve

On Tuesday, the Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant met in Washington with Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. Gallant says that he told the former that only “a decisive victory will bring this war to an end.” Shay Shabtai tries to outline what exactly this would entail, arguing that the IDF can and must attain a “strategic” victory, as opposed to merely a tactical or operational one. Yet even after a such a victory Israelis can’t expect to start beating their rifles into plowshares:

Strategic victory is the removal of the enemy’s ability to pose a military threat in the operational arena for many years to come. . . . This means the Israeli military will continue to fight guerrilla and terrorist operatives in the Strip alongside extensive activity by a local civilian government with an effective police force and international and regional economic and civil backing. This should lead in the coming years to the stabilization of the Gaza Strip without Hamas control over it.

In such a scenario, it will be possible to ensure relative quiet for a decade or more. However, it will not be possible to ensure quiet beyond that, since the absence of a fundamental change in the situation on the ground is likely to lead to a long-term erosion of security quiet and the re-creation of challenges to Israel. This is what happened in the West Bank after a decade of relative quiet, and in relatively stable Iraq after the withdrawal of the United States at the end of 2011.

Read more at BESA Center

More about: Gaza War 2023, Hamas, IDF