Peter Feldmajer is telling his fellow Jews to stay at home to protect them from acts of violence committed by the Hungarian extreme right. First thought: that papering over problems just makes them worse. But problems are also made worse, for various difficult-to-explain reasons, by people who exaggerate them. If we take Peter Feldmajer's suggestion seriously, then Jews in Israel should never set foot on the street. There, after all, suicide bombing terrorists, rockets fired from beyond the border and Shiite atomic bombs pose a far graver danger than anything over here. Returning home, maybe the National Roma Castle should also declare that Roma should stay home and lock the door behind them. Not just on market days and bank holidays, but all the time. They, surveys make clear, are the object of far greater prejudice than the Jews. Feldmajer's statement may well find itself a place in our country's media history as the most classic example of the boomerang effect. It will do nothing to discourage the anti-Semites. On the contrary, they'll just become bolder. "How strong we must be if the conspirators running the world are getting anxious," they must be thinking.

Before asking why Mazsihisz decided to shoot such a monumental own goal, we should examine a technical question. Can Mazsihisz speak in the name of all Hungarian Jews? The only democratic answer to this is no. A religious organization is in no position to represent atheists or believers in other supernatural forces. Our Jewish compatriots number many atheists, followers of other religions and those who interpret their faith in their own, individual, fashion. Within the faith, the orthodox/reform divide also makes it impossible for Mazsihisz to represent the whole spectrum of the faith.

The call to stay at home was presumably the result of a kind of post-Kadar reflex. The idea is that the small man, if he sees some kind of street circus, rather than providing help, should bow his head and run home - best not to get involved. If anti-Semitism were such a problem in our society, then Mazsihisz should not be calling on the community to stay at home but to get out there demonstrating straight away, before it is too late. If the house of law, of the sovereignty of the people, of citizen equality is burning, then forget about dignified commemoration. If racism becomes such an issue, then call on not just the Jews to demonstrate, but ask every citizen out onto the streets.

But Mazsihisz did not seek to harness public opinion. Probably because they themselves did not regard the danger as serious. Forgetting about positive aims, they are spreading fear as a way of bonding their followers together. There is anti-Semitism in Hungary, but it can hardly be a greater threat now than when Csurka, a veteran anti-Semite pamphleteer, served as vice-president of the senior coalition partner in the first freely elected Parliament. Or when the same politician steered his newly-founded party into Parliament.

In the New York and Chicago of the 1930s, gangster bands rampaged, strikers and strike-breakers clashed, the Great Depression drove crime to unprecedented levels. The streets of Moscow, quaking under Stalinist terror, were certainly a safer place to be. Jews did not take to the streets in the Kadar era either. Democracy has its side-effects, unfortunately. Right now, this means blinkered, hate-filled rioters can run wild.

But I prefer democracy. And I suspect so, too, do believing Jews, who after 1967 looked on in disbelief at the way Mazsihisz's predecessor collaborated with a communist power that broke off diplomatic relations with Israel and celebrated terrorists.

László Tamás Papp