A seven member high level Hungarian delegation visited Los Angeles, headed by Zoltan Balog, Minister of Human Capacity, and Katalin Novak, State Secretary for Family and Youth Services. Attorney and Los Angeles County Commissioner, Andrew Friedman, held a breakfast reception for the delegation in his Hancock Park home for a dialogue with four distinguished rabbis – Rabbi Pinchos Gruman, dean of Los Angeles Rabbis; Rabbi Yuval Noff, Rabbinical Council of America; Rabbi Zvi B. Hollander, Orthodox Union; Rabbi Yoel Gold, Congregation Bais Naftoli.
The participants discussed the rich Jewish-Hungarian heritage, including that two-thirds of the fourteen Hungarian Nobel Prize winners have Jewish origin. Hungarian schools are required to teach about the Shoa as well as Jewish cultural integration into mainstream Hungarian society for hundreds of years. Minister Balog, in addressing the gathering, stated that “it is only through proper dialogue and extensive education of the youth that anti-Semitism can be eliminated.”