Holocaust memorial plaque (Rozsnyó)

Until 2002, there was nothing in Rožňany to remind us that Jews had once lived in the city. In the 1970s, the city government even liquidated the Jewish cemetery, and the tombstones that had originally been removed from there gradually disappeared. After several attempts in the city, it was only in 2002 that a small bilingual memorial plaque cast in metal was placed on the wall of the city hall in memory of the victims of the Rožňany Holocaust. István Lebovits, who was from Rožňany, played a major role in the preparation of the Rožňany Holocaust memorial plaque: …István Lebovits (Rožňany, October 10, 1922) was born as the first child of Lebovits Mendel, a thirty-two-year-old cantor of the Rožňany religious community, and Fanny Dicker, a twenty-seven-year-old housewife. (…) he settled in the USA and worked in foreign trade. He often and willingly returns to Rožňava through his business connections. He sadly experienced that during the time of the city leaders Béla Molnár and Lajos Lucsko, all Jewish cultural and historical monuments disappeared. For this reason, in the 1960s, he initiated and supported the construction of a monument commemorating the Holocaust martyrs of Rožňava. After repeated promises, his proposal was slowly forgotten. In 2002, he offered his help again and, with the help of some local residents, managed to erect a memorial plaque on the wall of the old town hall after fifty-eight years to the more than four hundred Rožňava Holocaust victims.