A memorial plaque of the ‘Slovak Jewish Heritage Travel’ was unveiled at the Menhaz Jewish centre in Komárno on Sunday, January 25, to mark Holocaust Memorial Day on January 27 and the 100th anniversary of the Jewish Youth Organisation in Komárno, the TASR newswire wrote. The Jewish Religious Community (ŽNO) in Komárno has been organising this event since 2007.
“It's important to show that Jewish cultural heritage still exists in Slovakia and, as well, we commemorate the victims of the Holocaust. It's important for us that Menhaz today has become a part of the European Jewish Cultural Heritage Travel, and we hope that more people from Slovakia and abroad will visit it,” the ŽNO coordinator in Komárno, Tamás Paszternak, told TASR.
“It has been 100 years since the establishment of the Jewish Youth Organisation in Komarno. Therefore, throughout the year we will commemorate those young people who never grew to become adults because of an insane idea - Fascism. Our January programme will take place on both sides of the Danube River - in Slovakia and Hungary. It will have one aim - to strengthen tolerance and to fight against hatred and discrimination,” said Paszternak. “Children who are now finishing high school are 18 and were born after 1990. They don't remember socialism, much less what happened nearly 70 years ago,” said the director of Slovak centre of Jewish Cultural Heritage, Maroš Borský.
About 3,000 Jews lived in Komárno and its surroundings but most of them were deported and not many returned home. The Jewish community in Komárno is one of the last 12 of its kind in Slovakia and has around 60 members. The United Nations has declared January 27, the day Jews from liberated from the concentration camps in Auschwitz and Birkenau, as Holocaust Memorial Day. TASR
Compiled by Zuzana Vilikovská from press reports
The Slovak Spectator cannot vouch for the accuracy of the information presented in its Flash News postings.
