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.

Most likely, it was the Israeli Air Force that attacked eastern Syria Monday night, apparently destroying a convoy carrying Iranian weapons. Yoav Limor comments:

Israel reportedly carried out 32 attacks in Syria in 2022, and since early 2023 it has already struck 25 times in the country—at the very least. . . . The Iranian-Israeli clash stands out in the wake of the dramatic events in the region, chiefly among them is the effort to strike a normalization deal between Israel and Saudi Arabia, and later on with various other Muslim-Sunni states. Iran is trying to torpedo this process and has even publicly warned Saudi Arabia not to “gamble on a losing horse” because Israel’s demise is near. Riyadh is unlikely to heed that demand, for its own reasons.

Despite the thaw in relations between the kingdom and the Islamic Republic—including the exchange of ambassadors—the Saudis remain very suspicious of the Iranians. A strategic manifestation of that is that Riyadh is trying to forge a defense pact with the U.S.; a tactical manifestation took place this week when Saudi soccer players refused to play a match in Iran because of a bust of the former Revolutionary Guard commander Qassem Suleimani, [a master terrorist whose militias have wreaked havoc throughout the Middle East, including within Saudi borders].

Of course, Israel is trying to bring Saudi Arabia into its orbit and to create a strong common front against Iran. The attack in Syria is ostensibly unrelated to the normalization process and is meant to prevent the terrorists on Israel’s northern border from laying their hands on sophisticated arms, but it nevertheless serves as a clear reminder for Riyadh that it must not scale back its fight against the constant danger posed by Iran.