Last update - 00:00 19/11/2006
Project names Hungarian lawyers who took Jewish colleagues' clients
By Amiram Barkat, Haaretz Correspondent
A research project revealed the identities of thousands of non-Jewish Hungarian lawyers who took on the clients of their Jewish colleagues in 1944. This transfer of clients was methodical and public, and was publicized in official Hungarian newspapers.
The International Association of Jewish Lawyers and Jurists conducted the research ahead of its annual conference. Haaretz has learned that the Hungarian bar association refused to cooperate with the researchers, apparently to protect members from potential lawsuits by the Jewish lawyers' descendants.
Attorney Alex Hertman, president of the international association, believes some of the law firms that profited from the disenfranchisement of the Jewish attorneys are still operating today, even though the individual lawyers are no longer alive.
Hertman told Haaretz that the research was motivated by historical education and not for legal purposes. "We want to memorialize the lawyers and emphasize the historical truth that the Hungarian establishment - and not the Germans - disinherited the Jewish citizens." Hertman added, "We are not talking about compensation at this time."
The Hungarian authorities launched their campaign against Jewish lawyers starting in 1920, capping the number of Jews allowed to study law. However, Dr. Gavriel Bar-Shaked discovered that despite the limitations, Jews constituted the vast majority of lawyers in Hungary prior to World War II: In 1939, the Hungarian bar had 6,738 members, of whom 52 percent, or 3,523, were Jewish.
The findings will be presented today at the "Remember Budapest" conference, which includes Jewish legal luminaries from all over the world.
Former Israeli justice minister and Yad Vashem chair Yosef Lapid is scheduled to tell the story of his father, Dr. Bella Lampel. Lampel had a small law firm in Novi Sad, Yugoslavia. After the Hungarian army conquered the area in 1942, Lampel was prohibited from working in his profession. Two years later he was deported to Auschwitz along with 400,000 Hungarian Jews. Lampel died in the concentration camp Mauthausen.
"I believe the Hungarians don't like to hear me say this, but without the cooperation and agreement of the Hungarian people, the Holocaust of Hungarian Jewry would not have taken place," said Lapid.