BUDAPEST (JTA) — Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban visited a Jewish cemetery in Budapest to honor Jewish soldiers who were killed in World War I.

“Without the sacrifices that Hungarian Jews made during the First World War, it would have been impossible to defend our homeland,” Orban said Monday at a ceremony to mark the renovation of WWI graves in the Kozma Street Cemetery, the largest Jewish burial place in the Hungarian capital.

Orban said hundreds of Jewish soldiers from the war, from 1914 to 1918, were buried in the cemetery. The Hungarian government provided funding for the recent renovation of the graves.

Some Hungarian Jews criticized the timing of the event, one day before International Holocaust Remembrance Day and the 70th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau. Half a million Hungarian Jews were killed at the concentration camp.