Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has greeted the episcopal congregation of the Unitarian Church on the occasion of the inauguration of István Kovács as Unitarian bishop, the PM’s press chief told MTI.
In his letter, the prime minister referred to the “old truth” that it was “not the size of the source of light, but its brightness” that mattered.
Orbán said the reunification of the Hungarian Unitarian community nine years ago after being split in two as a result of the Trianon Peace Treaty had been “an uplifting feeling for all Hungarians”.
Photo: MTI/Kiss Gábor
The community’s reunification, he said, had proven that what had been divided by “hostile powers, distorted ideologies and human weakness” could still be reunited nine decades later “by our shared faith and the command of our national unity which transcends borders”.
The prime minister encouraged the new bishop to be a “brave guardian” of the cultural and spiritual heritage that has been preserved over five centuries by Christianity’s sole denomination of Hungarian origin.
Speaker of the National Assembly László Kövér Photo: MTI/Kiss Gábor
Orbán said he was convinced that the future of the Hungarian people was in the hands of communities that were proud of their past, their ancestors and their values, who were not afraid to follow the example of Jesus and stand up for the respect of the created world, life, family, individual responsibility and the freedom of conscience.
He concluded his letter by wishing the church’s newly elected leaders blessed service in their roles and many decades filled with faith to the Unitarian community.
“Remembrance is a part of our shared future,” András Heisler, the president of the Federation of Hungarian Jewish Communities (Mazsihisz), said on Monday at a commemoration of the 77th anniversary of the liberation of the Jewish ghetto in Budapest.
The survivors of the Holocaust would soon all be gone “and we’ll be left to ourselves with the duty and curse of remembrance”, he said.
Heisler said the descendants of Holocaust survivors had a duty to keep the memories of their ancestors alive, because otherwise they would be disowning the suffering their parents and grandparents had endured.
József Sebes, head of the Raoul Wallenberg Association, said his organisation wanted to honour the actions of its namesake Swedish diplomat, who rescued tens of thousands of Jews during the Holocaust in Hungary, by contributing to a way of thinking that people should be judged by their personalities and not based on their belonging to a certain group. Sebes named the fight against racial, religious and political discrimination as a key goal of the association.
Dag Hartelius, Sweden’s ambassador to Hungary, said
everyone had a duty to remember the Holocaust and had a role to play in the fight against anti-Semitism, adding that Wallenberg’s legacy served as a guiding principle in this.
Zoltán István Horváth, parish priest of the Cathedral of St. Theresa of Avila, said young people needed to be told about those who helped save Jews during the Holocaust, so that they could serve as role models whose “faith, conviction, love and humanity defeats all forms of fear” and who were willing to risk their lives to save those facing persecution.
Monday’s commemoration was organised by the Raoul Wallenberg Association and the Embassy of Sweden in Budapest.
The event ended with participants laying flowers on the memorial dedicated to Wallenberg.
As we wrote on Monday, the United Hungarian Jewish Community (EMIH) held a commemoration at the The Shoes on the Danube Bank Holocaust memorial on the occasion of the 77th anniversary of the liberation of the Budapest ghetto. Details HERE.
The United Hungarian Jewish Community (EMIH) on Monday held a commemoration at the The Shoes on the Danube Bank Holocaust memorial on the occasion of the 77th anniversary of the liberation of the Budapest ghetto.
Slomó Köves, EMIH’s chief rabbi, said they were commemorating the hundreds of thousands of Hungarian victims who died during the Holocaust “for what they were, not for what they did”.
He said remembrance must be turned into action. Jewish teaching, he added, held that accepting love without rationalising it was the surest way to vanquish meaningless, unreasonable hatred.
Oberlander Baruch, head of the Orthodox Rabbinate of Budapest, recalled that his father — who had survived the period of deportations in Budapest thanks to hiding and fake papers — was then forced to watch as Jewish children, women and men were shot into the Danube. Though he had escaped, this terrible memory stayed with him for the rest of his life, he said.
At the www.emlekezes77.hu website, videos of interviews with Holocaust survivors and their rescuers can be watched every hour for 77 hours.
The decree marking the boundaries of Budapest’s “large” ghetto was published on November 29, 1944,
and the area containing Dohány Street, Nagyatádi Szabó (today Kertész) Street, Király Street, Csányi Street, Rumbach Sebestyén Street, Madách Imre Street, Madách Imre Square and Károly Boulevard was sealed on December 10.
Initially 40,000 people forced to wear the yellow star were relocated to the ghetto’s 4,513 apartments, but numbers grew rapidly, reaching 70-80,000 by the start of the following year.
In spite of the efforts of the Red Cross, most received only 700-800 calories a day, and at the end of December, the situation deteriorated further during the Soviet siege. People died in large numbers, with 80-120 dead taken away each day.
When the ghetto was liberated on January 18, 1945, more than 3,000 dead bodies were found on Klauzál Square alone.
Cardinal Péter Erdő, Hungary’s Catholic leader, stressed the importance of the centres of Christian faith and “missionary spirit” at the opening of an ecumenical week of prayer in the Evangelical Church in Budapest’s Deák Square on Sunday evening.
“Today, when we feel that our culture is going through a deep crisis, we have a need for centres of deep, Christian knowledge and faith like monasteries were in the Middle Ages,” the Archbishop of Esztergom-Budapest said.
“But courage and missionary spirit are also needed so that we can reach people with completely different customs and cultures and bring them the liberating Gospel of Christ,” Erdő added.
Zoltán Balog, the head of the Synod of the Hungarian Reformed Church, said that without God’s will and message, it did not matter “if our social acceptance is high, if our institutional system is getting stronger and if everything seems to be going fine”.
“Because things can and will only be fine if God speaks and we all hear it,”
The government’s Hungary Helps programme has assisted 500,000 people worldwide during the past 5 years, Tristan Azbej, state secretary in charge of the scheme to help persecuted Christian communities, told public television M1 late on Wednesday.
The programme not only helped persecuted people stay in their homeland, but “sometimes it was successful in reversing migration”, the state secretary said. He noted that some 1,000 families returned to Syria with Hungarian assistance. He also added that Syria’s Christian community, which used to number 2.3 million people before the civil war, has now shrunken to less than one million.
Azbej said that although there was no more fighting over the larger part of Syria,
residents suffered from an economic collapse and deep poverty.
Many have left the country but local Christians cling to their homeland, which is among the oldest sites of Christianity.
Leaders of the Reformed Church in Hungary have recommended László Trócsányi for rector of Károli Gáspár University, the university told MTI on Wednesday.
The church has initiated that President János Áder should appoint Professor László Trócsányi, representing Hungary’s ruling Fidesz party in the European Parliament, as the university’s rector, the institution’s Senate said in line with the proposal of the General Synod and its head, Bishop Zoltán Balog.
Trócsányi was Hungary’s ambassador to Brussels from 2000 to 2004, and to Paris from 2010 to 2014.
He served as minister of justice from 2014 until his election as member of the European Parliament in 2019.
The Hungary Helps humanitarian scheme has been a success and is set to continue next year, the state secretary in charge of the programme said on Thursday.
Hungary’s government has supported communities in more than 40 countries through the programme and has helped more than half a million people stay in their homelands, Trisztan Azbej told public news channel M1.
Hungary was the first country to start supporting persecuted Christians,
Azbej said, adding that Christianity was the most persecuted religion in the world today. He said the Hungary Helps scheme also helped prevent hundreds of thousands of people from setting off towards Europe.
Among the programme’s contributions this year, Azbej noted the inauguration of a vocational training centre in Kenya, support for Armenian churches in Iraq and Syria and the donation of 100,000 doses of coronavirus vaccine to Armenia.
Hungary also negotiated the release of five prisoners of war by Azerbaijan to Armenia,
The Hungarian Catholic Bishops’ Conference (HCBC) and the government have signed an agreement on higher education institutions run by the Catholic Church, HCBC said on Friday.
The document has been signed by HCBC President András Veres and Deputy Prime Minister Zsolt Semjén, the statement said.
The agreement aims to ensure that Catholic Church-run higher education institutions, similarly to universities switching to a new, foundation-based model, provide the high standards of education focused on values and knowledge that meet modern demands and serve the whole of society, HCBC added.
“God the comforter is with us even when we have to descend to our depths in order to appreciate the light from on High,” Bishop Tamás Fabiny, the head of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Hungary, told MTI on Friday.
“Christmas and our meeting with Jesus can once again bring light into our lives burdened by the pandemic, as it did for Joseph and Mary at the time of the first Christmas,” he said.
“Christians believe that God doesn’t abandon us even when we’re at our lowest because he is the God of heights and depths,”
the bishop said.
Meanwhile, Fabiny said that thanks to the vaccines, members of the Evangelical Lutheran Church were again attending worship services, albeit in fewer numbers than before the lockdown. He said the makeup of those attending church had also changed, adding that “many of the elderly haven’t found their way back yet”. However,
the worship services are now being attended by more young people who found the church through the online services during the lockdown,
Fabiny said.
The bishop also touched on the International Eucharistic Congress held in Budapest in September, highlighting the cooperation among the various Christian denominations at the event.
“A characteristic of Christian holidays is that the harder the outside circumstances, the more in tune we can be with their essence,” Zoltán Balog, the head of the Synod of the Hungarian Reformed Church, told MTI on the occasion of Christmas.
Like at the time of the first ever Christmas, circumstances today are not ideal, “but if one has everything they want and everything goes right, one can easily come to believe that they are what makes the holiday a holiday”, Balog said. But the essence of the Christian holiday is that it is created by God, “and if the external props aren’t there, it’s easier to pay attention to this essence”, he added.
The Reformed bishop said what most people would miss the most this
Christmas was loved ones they could not celebrate together with.
Balog said many families, including his own, had members who were living abroad. “But this absence of the other person shows their value. Those whom we truly miss are truly important,” he said.
As regards the effect of the pandemic on church life, Balog said the number of churchgoers had dropped due to the lockdowns. Since churches reopened people are “more conscious” of how they attend church, because it also takes courage, he said.
Balog said the leadership of the Reformed Church had learned that
closing churches was wrong, arguing that they were needed most in difficult times.
“If we observe certain restrictions, then going to church can’t be any riskier than going to the store,” Balog said. “And just like how we can’t give up buying milk, bread, fruit, we also have a daily need for bread and fruit for the soul.” He said attending worship service in a community satisfied this need far more than watching the service online at home.
Balog said one lesson to be learned from the pandemic was that
“we can’t keep living the way he have been.”
“This pandemic is not a natural disaster . which we can say isn’t our fault,” he said. “The coronavirus pandemic is connected to the global tendencies that conflate everything and don’t respect boundaries, because those are what led to the epidemic plaguing the whole world instead of remaining local. And we’ve been given a chance to learn from this.”
“The belief that life on Earth is not the end of it all gives us courage and makes us realise that living with love for each other is more important than life itself,” Cardinal Péter Erdő, the head of the Hungarian Catholic Church, told MTI on Friday.
The cardinal said Christians had a duty to share the hope and serenity they drew from their faith with others, adding that Christians drew their faith and courage from God’s coming into the world.
“God didn’t just join us, but became a fetus, a child for our sake,”
Erdő said. He said there had also been epidemics and illness in Jesus’s time, and there were not as many ways to combat them as there are today.
Meanwhile, the cardinal said the lockdown had not discouraged believers to continue going to church, and had even resulted in more people attending masses in the capital. Erdo said he believed the increase in churchgoers could be down to the easing of the pandemic or the
impact of the International Eucharistic Congress held in Budapest this past September.
As regards the congress, the cardinal said the whole of Europe and the entire world had “watched with wonder our liberated gathering and the beautiful way in which we celebrated”.
“This liberated joy is what Pope Francis noticed after not having been able to meet with this many believers for the past two years because of the lockdowns,” Erdő said. “It’s no accident that the pope said he’d gladly return to Hungary.”
The Hungarian Red Cross, in cooperation with a chain store, has collected 34 tonnes of goods it will distribute at Christmas among people and families in need, the organisation said on Thursday. The Hungarian Baptist Charity has collected 50,930 individual donations packed in shoe boxes to be given as Christmas presents to children in poor families, the charity told MTI on Thursday.
In the case of the Red Cross, the goods include durable food, sanitary and hygienic supplies, sweets and toys donated by customers in 24 Auchan department stores over the past two Advent weekends across the country, it said in a statement.
The donations will be sorted into combined packages by social care experts and distributed with the help of the Red Cross’s regional offices. “The donations will
help us support 9,700 people and families primarily at Christmas time
but also later on during ordinary days for a couple of weeks,” Judit Waller-Fekete, a representative of Red Cross, said in the statement.
The Hungarian Baptist Charity said that some 10,000 donations had poured in in the last two days of the popular Shoe Box Campaign, held for the 18th time this year.
Some of the boxes will go to ethnic Hungarian children in Romania and Ukraine.
More than a hundred thousand ultra-orthodox, Hasidic Jews live in New York’s Brooklyn. Most of them have Hungarian ancestors, who were forced to live their birthplace during the dark ages of the 20th century. In the “New World”, they rebuilt their community but did not forget where they came from. Therefore, one can run into a lot of Hungarian inscriptions in Brooklyn. Offbeat Budapest has collected these in a thorough article recently.
Ancestors came from Budapest and other Hungarian cities to Brooklyn
According to the news site, “at about South 9th Street, a strikingly different world emerges; gone are the designer stores, stylish hipsters, and luxury high-rises. Instead, a secluded world of ultra-Orthodox Jews appears.”
People wear their traditional clothes. Men have hats, long beards, side curls, and black coats from which the white fringes of their prayer shawls hang. Meanwhile, bewigged women wear long black skirts “navigate the streets with baby strollers and roving children.” Everything is kosher. Restaurants, grocery stores have Yiddish inscriptions making this part of Brooklyn a surreal experience for every visitor.
Most people living there originate from Hungary, so it is not hard to find somebody, who talks Hungarian.
Hasidic Judaism, an ultra-orthodox branch of Orthodox Judaism, was popular in the northeastern parts of the Kingdom of Hungary in the 19th century. This territory belongs today to Ukraine, and it is called Transcarpathia. Still, more than 120 thousand Hungarians live there, but almost no Hungarian Jews.
Unlike the Jews living in cities and Budapest, Hasidic Jews did not want to assimilate. They “held to the ancient traditions and formed large hereditary dynasties (or sects) under the strict guidance of a revered grand rebbe. After the Holocaust, when nearly all were killed, the survivors fled Hungary and
rebuilt their communities from the ashes in the newly formed Israel and the United States”– Offbeat Budapest wrote.
Synagogues named after Hungarian cities
Today more than 150,000 ultra-orthodox Jews are living in Brooklyn having Hungarian ancestors. The biggest dynasty is Satmar, named after the Hungarian town Szatmárnémeti. It is now in Romania, but half of its population still speaks Hungarian. Satmar Meat is also a chain of kosher butcher shops with locations in Williamsburg and Borough Park.
Other major Hungarian Hasidic groups in Brooklyn include the Munkatch (Munkács), Popa (Pápa), Klausenburg (Kolozsvár) dynasties, as well as smaller ones, such as those from Kaliv (Nagykálló), Kerestir (Bodrogkeresztúr), and Liska (Olaszliszka). Yosef Rapaport, a respected community leader in Borough Park, said that most orthodox Jews living in Brooklyn speak Yiddish with a Hungarian accent.
Here is a video about the streets of the Hasidic Jewish district of New York City:
Interestingly, Hasidism is not uniform. For example, Hungarian Hasidim is hospitable, and the coffee room is well-stocked and free in a Hungarian synagogue. “Marrying a Hungarian woman is almost like getting extra points” – Alexander Rapaport, son of Yosef and the owner of Masbia, a non-profit soup kitchen network.
Borough Park, a neighbourhood in the southwestern part of the borough of Brooklyn, has 300 small synagogues named after places in Hungary like Sopron, Debrecen, or Mád.
A Hungarian song every Hasidic child in America learns
Not everybody fled Hungary because of WWII. Some came after the Soviets crushed the 1956 revolution. One of them was Menashe Gottlieb’s grandfather, Zoltán. Menashe runs a restaurant
offering traditional Hungarian dishes like goulash, stuffed cabbage, cabbage noodles (káposztás tészta), or paprika potatoes (paprikás krumpli).
Unfortunately, the Hungarian language slowly disappears since the old generation dies out and their grandchildren speak only a few words. However, they still know folk songs like “Szól a kakas már”, which is the national anthem of Hungarian Hasidic Jews. “It’s a song of yearning for Jerusalem, a song with a lot of emotional power” – Yosef Rapaport said. Therefore, almost every Hasidic child in America learns it.
According to the locals, Hasidic Jews regularly visit the towns and villages they originate from in Hungary. “The name of the town is much more important to us than anyone in Hungary would think.
It’s an alternative universe” –
highlighted Yosef.
You can learn more about the everyday life of the Hasidic Jews or how they celebrate the Sabbath in Offbeat Budapest’s article HERE.
Cardinal Péter Erdő, the Archbishop of Esztergom-Budapest, and First Lady Anita Herczegh on Saturday gave out packages to 250 children living in poverty at the Sacred Heart Church in Budapest’s 12th district.
Erdő greeted the children and said Jesus was present in all children. “When we give to you, we do so as if we gave to the Baby Jesus,” he said.
Archbishop of Esztergom-Budapest and the Hungarian First Lady gave out packages to children living in poverty Photo: MTI/Mohai Balázs
Miklós Soltész, the state secretary responsible for state and church relations, told MTI that 2021 was a “busy year” for charity organisations, starting with the aid sent to the victims of an earthquake in central Croatia, to supporting children who lost parents to the coronavirus pandemic through the Regőczi Foundation.
Archbishop of Esztergom-Budapest and the Hungarian First Lady gave out packages to children living in poverty
Photo: MTI/Mohai Balázs
Archbishop of Esztergom-Budapest and the Hungarian First Lady gave out packages to children living in poverty
Photo: MTI/Mohai Balázs
Archbishop of Esztergom-Budapest and the Hungarian First Lady gave out packages to children living in poverty
Photo: MTI/Mohai Balázs
Students of Catholic schools assembled 450 packages from donations, addressed to specific children. The rest of the packages will be distributed in rural Hungary and Transcarpathia.
Hungarian and Russian Christians plan to launch joint projects to support the education of Christians in Syria, Tristan Azbej, the state secretary responsible for aiding persecuted Christians, said after talks with Archimandrite Philaret, Vice-Chairman of the Foreign Church Relations of the Moscow Patriarchate.
Azbej said the meeting had been organised as a result of a October 2019 Hungary-Russia summit, where Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and Russian President Vladimir Putin decided in the presence of Syrian church leaders that Hungary and Russia would cooperate to aid Syrian Christians.
He added that he had agreed with Archimandrite Philaret on the join preparation of projects. Several schools have been destroyed in the civil war in Syria going back more than a decade, and many teenagers had no chance of receiving any form of education, he said.
“Local churches fulfil a significant social mission, and Hungary, as ever, plans to support the Christian communities in these efforts in cooperation with Russian partners,”
he said.
Azbej said he had received an award from Sergei Stepashin, head of the Imperial Orthodox Palestine Society and a former prime minister of Russia, and the Middle Cross from Vyacheslav Ostapchuk, head of the Orthodox Russia All-Russia Social Movement. Azbej added that this was in recognition of the Hungarian government and people’s efforts to support persecuted Christians and protect their interests. Stepashin expressed appreciation to Hungary for uniquely supporting the matter at government level, Azbej added.
President János Áder on Wednesday hosted an Advent lunch held for the heads of Hungarian churches beyond the borders at Sándor Palace, the presidential office.
He said that ever since the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic, Hungarians had grown increasingly reliant on each other. “No one is saved alone,” the president cited Pope Francis as saying.
“We Hungarians, within and beyond the borders, cannot cope, prosper or grow … without the support of each other.”
Hosting the church leaders for the last time as president, Áder thanked them for meetings, advice, “brotherly gestures” and sincerity in expressing their opinions.
The Advent lunch was attended by House Speaker László Kövér and Deputy Prime Minister Zsolt Semjén, as well as by Gergely Gulyás, the prime minister’s chief of staff, and the two state secretaries in charge of policies for Hungarian communities abroad and church and minority relations at the prime minister’s office.
The Hungarian government supports Christian communities abroad in their fight for survival, Miklós Soltész, state secretary for church and minority relations, told MTI on Sunday after visiting Montenegro and Bosnia and Herzegovina earlier this week.
The Hungarian government has part-financed three projects in the Western Balkans through its Hungary Helps programme, he said.
Soltész noted that in Mostar, the location of two projects, Hungarian soldiers had started the reconstruction of the city’s iconic 16th-century bridge just 25 years ago.
Most recently, the Hungarian government contributed 24.5 million forints (€ 67,000) to both the building of a gymnasium for a local boarding-school and the reconstruction of the Serbian Orthodox cathedral that had been totally demolished during the Bosnian war between 1992 and 1995, he said.
In Montenegro, Hungary has provided a Roman Catholic Albanian community with 24.5 million forints (€ 68.000) in support for the reconstruction of a library of a Franciscan monastery, Soltész said.
On a different note, the dignitaries of the Catholic, Reformed and Lutheran churches prayed together for coronavirus victims and the end of the pandemic in Saint Stephen’s Basilica in Budapest on the first Sunday of Advent in the presence of President János Áder and First Lady Anita Herczegh.
President János Áder and his Wife
Photo: MTI/Balogh Zoltán
President János Áder and his Wife
Photo: MTI/Balogh Zoltán
Zoltán Balog, president of the Reformed Church in Hungary, said that the pandemic may have plenty of messages “but for us, Christians, it carries the message that we should stay together.
Gábor Mohos, coadjutor bishop of Esztergom-Budapest, said the pandemic “provided an opportunity for us to reconsider the priorities of life”.
Tamás Fabinyi, presiding bishop of the Lutheran Church in Hungary, said that suffering and prayer go hand in hand “but in times of suffering we should never pray only for ourselves but for all sufferers”.
During the ecumenical prayer, donations were collected for the Regőczi Foundation that was set up by the presidential couple to help children orphaned by Covid.
The Hungarian government’s Hungary Helps programme has helped 500,000 people to remain in or return to their homelands in the four years since it was founded, the Prime Minister’s Office said in a statement on Friday.
Since 2017, Hungary Helps has launched over 170 projects in 50 countries, providing humanitarian aid, supporting reconstruction works and helping to preserve Christian communities in crisis regions, the ministry said.
Tristan Azbej, the state secretary responsible for aiding persecuted Christians and for the Hungary Helps scheme, attended the inauguration ceremony of a training facility in a shanty town in Nairobi, Kenya.
The training facility was built with Hungarian funding and will contribute to the training of 500 young people “living in hopeless circumstances”, the statement said.
