(Jewish Group) Budapest's new $30m Holocaust museum sits in limbo as Hungary debates its contents

The House of Fates Holocaust museum, housed in a former railway station that deported Jews to concentration camps, seen in Budapest, Jan. 21, 2019. It has not opened to the public despite having been finished five years ago. (Ferenc Isza/AFP/Getty Images)

BUDAPEST (JTA) — The regular commuters on Fiumei Way, a major traffic artery in this city’s east, are already used to the unusual monument that locals call “the Jewish star.”

Built in 2015, the monument comprises a 60-foot-long six-pointed metal corridor that is suspended in midair, connecting two towers of stacked-up cattle wagons. It looks like a Star of David-shaped ray of light blazing through a pair of apartment buildings.

It’s by far the tallest and most eye-grabbing memorial for the Holocaust in a country where the work of commemorating the genocide is complicated by the fact that many locals at the time were complicit in it.

It’s also not open, and hasn’t been since construction was completed in 2015 — making it a $30 million, rat-infested symbol of the bitter fights between some Jewish community leaders and the right-wing government of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, and among themselves, over how to commemorate the Holocaust.

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