"We hope this is just the first step, and we hope there will be some other payments in the near future," said Peter Feldmayer, president of the Federation of Hungarian Jewish Communities in an interview with BosNewsLife.

Under the deal reached between the German government and the Claims Conference payments will be given to "certain Jewish survivors of the Nazi occupation of Budapest," the Claims Conference added in a statement released in Budapest this week. The organisation has been representing Jews in negotiating compensation and restitution for victims of Nazi persecution since 1951.

The group said Hungarian Jewish ghetto survivors, who currently reside in eastern Europe and did so far not receive any payments from major compensation programs – will receive a one-time payment of 1,900 euros ($2.900) from the Claims Conference Budapest Fund. The application deadline for compensation is August 6, 2009.

MANY DIED

At least 600,000 Hungarian Jews died in the Holocaust. "Many Jews also died in the ghetto of Budapest, we believe some 80.000 people were murdered by the Hungarian nazis who helped the Germans," Feldmayer explained. 

He said Germany had long opposed compensation for Hungarian ghetto survivors as they did not fulfill German legal requirements of at least 18 months being cut-off from the outside world. “That was the case in most ghetto’s in Europe, but in Hungary that period lasted only some three months as the Red Army came to rescue Budapest." Yet, he said “horrible things” had happen in the Budapest ghetto, and said he regretted it took Germany "many years" to finally compensate for that suffering, as many people have meanwhile died.     

"I agree that the time is running. In 1990 there were more than more than 40.000 survivors of the Holocaust but at the end of the 1990s there were 20,000 people. Now there are only about 14,000 survivors, so many died in the last 15 years," he said. "It is a very bad feeling, it should have been done earlier, but what can we do?"

There are up to 100,000 Jews currently living in Hungary, out of a total population of 10 million, the largest Jewish community in Eastern Europe, outside Russia.

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