About 200 protesters demonstrated in front of the Parliament House in Vienna, the capital of Austria, on Tuesday evening.
They were rallying against an event called the Dinghofer Symposium, which they say is anti-Semitic.
Parliamentary Speaker Walter Rosenkranz, who hosted the event, had come under widespread criticism in previous weeks for going ahead with the symposium despite calls to cancel it.
Some protesters held signs that read, “No room for anti-Semitism” or “Shame on you.”
“Dinghofer was an anti-Semite and a member of the Nazi Party during World War II,” said Lia Gutmann, co-chair of the Austrian Union of Jewish Students group.
Gutmann said the protesters were holding a “counter-symposium” against “historical amnesia” outside the parliament.
What is the dispute about?
The Dinghoffer Symposium is named after Franz Dinghoffer, who was Chancellor of Austria in the 1920s.
Dinghofer was a self-proclaimed “radical antisemite” and a pan-German nationalist who became a member of the Nazi Party during World War II.
Representatives of the FPÖ say that they remember Dinghoffer as a politician of the period between World War I and World War II.
The event, which has been held in parliament in the past, drew criticism from Austria’s Jewish community and major political parties, including the ruling three-party coalition.
Last week, more than a dozen historians said Parliament was being made “a place of respectful memory for an avowed anti-Semite.”
Event organized by far-right parliamentary speaker
Walter Rosenkranz is a senior member of Austria’s far-right Freedom Party (FPÖ).
He was elected president of the National Council, the lower house of Austria’s parliament, after topping the FPÖ’s legislative elections last year.
He has also faced widespread criticism for his membership of Vienna’s Libertas student fraternity, which is known for its extreme pan-German nationalism.
The country’s main Jewish organization has refused to work with him.
Speaking to Austria’s national broadcaster ORF on Tuesday, Rosenkranz defended the organization of the event.
He added that it is also possible to “see the positive aspects” in a person’s biography “despite all the dark sides”.
The symposium was held just days after Austria commemorated the massacre of November 9–10, 1938.
Then the Nazi regime launched a wave of coordinated attacks against Jews in Germany, And also in Austria, which had been occupied by Nazi Germany just a few months earlier. Many historians characterize the November massacre as a foreshadowing of the Holocaust.
The wave of attacks has historically been referred to as Kristallnacht, or “Night of Broken Glass”, but this term has not become popular in Germany, as it is widely seen as downplaying the scale of the violence.
Edited by: Sam Dusan Inayatullah