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When you create a story about yourself

that's based on a lie about who you are and who your family is,

sooner or later, it's bound to be revealed.

It's a reflection of a state built on falsehoods and lies...

the product of violent political changes...

the story of someone looking for the truth about the past,

the truth about themselves.

Who are we really?

A person who was looking for a way up and a way to be somebody

in a part of the world where history's been manipulated.

One of the legacies of Communism is a legacy of distrust.

Distrust both for your neighbors and for people who you know,

but also distrust for the government.

Jobbik seemed to offer something new, something energetic.

It offered power to younger people.

Csanád Szegedi was absolutely one of those young people,

and he needed something to be part of.

One of the things Csanád was always interested in was power.

Running the Hungarian Guard gave him that sense of being in charge of something.

His love of symbols and his understanding of how they can be manipulated

was very fundamental to his character.

And Csanád immediately caught on that you could make things exciting

by giving people something to look at, something to march in.

Jobbik plays openly with taboos,

and the Hungarian Guard was the greatest game of taboo that they played.

"We're challenging the narrative that fascism is bad and fascism was defeated.

Now that there's an alternative version of Hungarian history

which has been preserved in secret,

and now we can bring it out in the open again."

Csanád Szegedi was absolutely part of creating that sense.

Jobbik emerged from obscurity

to clinch that 15 percent and three seats in the European Parliament,

revealing a striking shift to the right in Hungary.

The global financial crisis has hit hard here...

Csanád became, at a very young age, a very prominent person.

He was connected to the leadership, connected to its founding,

connected to the Hungarian Guard and connected to all of its publications and activities.

Csanád wasn't merely an ideologue.

He was somebody who sought to organize, to make money, to fund the party,

but he attempted to show himself as an ordinary young Hungarian

who was in touch with the way ordinary young Hungarians are,

that he wasn't part of the establishment.

He had a kind of antiestablishment credibility.

Jobbik's a party that plays with rhetoric. It plays games.

It burns the European flag in front of the European Commission Building in Budapest.

They would play with some of the ideas of anti-Semitism using Jewish symbols

or implies that somehow the Jews are responsible without actually saying so.

And they'll often go quite far to saying things and then pull back.

In other words, it's a game of hints and whispers and jokes and symbols.

Once Csanád had been elected to the European Parliament,

he and other MPs and other MEPs inside Jobbik

began to see that if they really wanted power,

if they really wanted to become a ruling party in Hungary,

if they wanted a lasting, long political career,

that they would have to move away from some of the more extreme elements in the party.

I heard that on the Internet

you could find one of the leaders of the Jobbik Party,

that he's Jewish, with all the papers.

I said listen, that's my expertise.

I looked through it to see if it's real,

and it turned out that it was real.

The guy is Jewish. No question about it.

If he would come to me now to ask for a note if he's Jewish,

I would give it to him.

So that start... You know, it started me thinking about him as a Jew.

I said, hey, this has to be an interesting halakhic question.

You know, what does Jewish law say about a person like Szegedi Csanád

if he comes to, uh, shul, if he comes to synagogue?

I didn't know the answer yet, but the question's easy.

It's a real question.

Tuesday morning, imagine who called.

I said, "No, you're teasing me." You know?

What did he want?

He said he wants to meet me.

So, what should I do?

This was a situation I never dreamt of.

You know... You know, what am I supposed to tell him?

A lot of Jews are very, very upset.

"How could you sit down with such a Jew hater?

How could you accept him and speak nicely to him?"

Szegedi met with a Hungarian Orthodox rabbi

to apologize for his offensive remarks

and promised to visit Auschwitz to pay his respects.

Szegedi was a founding member of the Hungarian Guard, a pro-Nazi party.

When it eventually came out that Csanád really was Jewish,

the far-right Web sites and media went crazy.

"Well, of course this would be true.

The Jews are always disguising themselves as somebody else."

You know, "Naturally, they've infiltrated everything.

They've even infiltrated the far right."

Um, there were others who thought, you know, it's all a lie.

Csanád was playing a game the whole time.

It's impossible that he couldn't have known this.

People on the left in Hungary laughed.

Obviously, there's something absurd and something sort of rather satisfying.

He was pushed out with really nothing.

I mean, he had no obvious way to make money. He had no social circle.

His whole life had been wrapped up in this other group of people

from whom he was utterly cast out.

I'm convinced Jewish law says

we can accept him and we should accept him.

Every Jew has to be welcome and is welcome,

and no Jew can say, "Listen, I want him out of here

because I don't like him because of his past."

We decided that we're going to sit with him on a weekly basis

and, you know... and learn and talk.

He had these thoughts in his mind...

"How can I live with the thought that everything I did till today was wrong?"

I never met a person like this,

so broke, so void of his past and looking for a future.

And I prayed to God, "Help me, that I shouldn't say anything wrong,

but I should say all the right things."

There's no smooth transition from extreme right to normal.

It's not just, you know, a computer file.

You just erase it and write a new one.

It's a person. It's his mind, it's his heart, it's his convictions,

it's his work, it's his pride, it's his identity... everything together.

He specifically asked me, "Do I have to admit that everything that I did and said was wrong?"

I told him, "Listen, there's no reason not to face the facts.

If you come to the conclusion that you were wrong, you have to admit it."

But he doesn't understand exactly yet how bad,

uh, how wrong he was.

When you have a regime that has been lying for 50 years

and which everybody knows is lying,

that means that you create a generation of people who no longer know what's really true.

There's no agreement about what history is.

In that atmosphere, the truth is often hidden or disguised.

Just be quiet, withdraw, convert.

You know, become mainstream. Try and fit in.

Every day he's working on changing his identity

and strengthening his new identity.

He says he wants to be part of the Jewish community.

Fine. He can. But he still has a job.

He has to, uh, apologize.

But apologize meaning publicly, and also, more importantly, fix what he harmed.

Eins, zwei, drei, vier, fünf.

Thank you.

Shalom.

To be honest, I'm not quite sure.

Uh, should I believe him or should I not believe him?

How can somebody so extremely change his position?

It's really hard for me to see him here

right in the middle of us.

See him standing and talking to us and telling us, "I'm a Jew.

I'm a real Jew. Believe me. I'm proud to be Jewish."

I really don't believe him.

There's a concept in Judaism about teshuva...

repentance.

God gives every person the ability to repent,

and Maimonides says repentance means, uh...

what shall we say... regret

the bad deeds of the past

to make a strong commitment for the future.

Coming from the extreme right

to the point where he is now is a very long way.

He feels bad for the things that he did in the past. It's not enough.

It has to become a lecture that he will repeat again and again and again.

That I was wrong, Jobbik was wrong, and anti-Semitism is wrong.

So is he finished? No, he's not finished.

But is he... is he going in the right direction? Absolutely.

A year and a half ago, Csanád was the king of the anti-Semites.

Now Csanád wants to be the king of the Semites.

Montreal is the single Jewish community outside of Israel

with the largest percentage of survivors.

Bringing a guy like Csanád is really deeply insensitive.

The soul, whether you want to look at the religious viewpoint or in general,

is a very interesting piece of equipment, and we don't know.

Nobody can look into somebody else's soul.

I represent 600,000 Jews who've been killed.

I am represent the people, including my family, my parents,

who'd been killed by a Hungarian Nazi.

And there's always anti-Semitism under various guises.

You know what they say. If it walks like a duck and it sounds like a duck, must be a duck.

All kosher.

Mr. Szegedi was the poster boy in Central Europe

of anti-Semitism.

He was vice president of the Jobbik Nazi party,

and during that time, he never missed an opportunity to express his anti-Semitism.

We Jews believe in teshuva.

We have to give every person a chance of repentance.

He created an atmosphere, an anti-Semite atmosphere, in the city,

that when you say, "You dirty Jew," it's just like saying hello.

My part of the story is

that I decided give him a chance.

That's what Judaism teaches us.

Love every Jew. Give him a chance.

I really believe I will never become an anti-Semite.

Okay? So, please, don't scream at me.

He's an anti-Semite Jew.

Used to be.

He used to be. He was an anti-Semite...

What do you call a real Jew?

Is he eating kosher? Yes.

Is he... Is he praying? He puts on the tefillin?

Yes.

Then I'll tell you something.

Besides being a Nazi, he became a Nazi Jew.

Could be, could be, but this type of Nazi I like.

In the case of Csanád, there will always be a question of what's true.

Anybody who makes that kind of... identify shift

from, you know, far right to Orthodox Jew, will always be questioned,

and people will always have some doubt about what he says.

He himself says that he feels that he's a better person

now that he's being honest about who he is,

but, um, you know, maybe that's just another game.

You have to love every Jew,

no matter how wicked.

Well, I found a very wicked one.

You see, it's... You know, you have to love every Jew, and you have to try to help him

in the way you have to love every person and try to help.

If you're able to... to help somebody,

you have no right not to help him.

It wasn't an easy decision, but I felt it was the right decision.

And, um...

I, uh, really hope and I really believe

that I will not be, um, disappointed.

I pray... I pray that I shouldn't be disappointed.