Current Rutgers activities in support of Hungarian Studies include:
Hungarians have been numerous in New Jersey since the beginning of the twentieth century. New Brunswick was one of many Hungarian centers in the state, and more Hungarians came to the area after the defeat of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. The US government established a reception center for the refugees at Camp Kilmer in Piscataway, the future site of Livingston Campus. Tracy Voorhees, a retired federal official and Rutgers board member, chaired the committee in Washington, DC that oversaw the center. More than 32,000 Hungarian refugees passed through Camp Kilmer before the center closed in April 1957. English language classes for refugees and meetings for administrators took place at Rutgers during these months. Voorhees is visible in the above photo with his staff at the entrance to Camp Kilmer.
Elmhurst College in Illinois was one of several colleges that taught Hungarian language and culture as part of its training of ministers to serve Hungarian Protestant congregations. The Elmhurst program's director, Rev. August Molnár, founded the American Hungarian Studies Foundation in 1954 to fund Hungarian Studies research and instruction proposals outside the college. After Elmhurst decided in May 1957 to eliminate its Department of Hungarian Studies, Rev. Molnár sought a new launch pad for his ambitions. He approached Columbia University, then Rutgers in 1958. The response from Columbia was not encouraging, although Columbia had taught basic Hungarian for many years and hosted a series of interviews with Hungarian refugees that are now available online with the Open Society Archives of Budapest.
Rutgers welcomed the proposal. The Foundation's board as reconstituted in 1959 included many leaders of Hungarian American Protestantism and of business in the New Jersey region. In March 1959 the “American Hungarian Institute” was registered in New Jersey as the representative of the Foundation, still residing at Elmhurst but now with an address in New York City, and Rutgers accepted the proposal for the establishment of a Hungarian Studies program. Rev. Molnár became a Rutgers lecturer in the College of Arts and Sciences, with his salary paid for the next five years by the Foundation.
Hungarian Studies at Rutgers continued on a modest level after the end of the five years, with Rutgers-financed appointments for Joseph Held and Károly Nagy, two 56ers who had passed through Camp Kilmer and earned Ph.Ds in the US. Held was the Director of the Hungarian Studies Program in the Rutgers evening division beginning in 1966. The program began with elementary Hungarian classes but planned to expand into other disciplines "if there would be sufficient need and interest." These plans appear not to have panned out, but a decade later Held was Director of a Rutgers certificate program in Soviet and East European Studies. Held and Nagy organized the acquisition of classic Hungarian books for the Rutgers library that are still in our collection.
At least two dozen 56ers enrolled in Rutgers degree programs after their arrival. Nagy himself led a "Weekend Hungarian School" on the Rutgers campus from 1960 until 1973 when it moved to the Hungarian neighborhood. He helped organize the Hungarian Alumni Association after his graduation from Rutgers College, which held a series of lectures on Hungarian topics in the College Avenue Student Center over the course of several decades. Gyöngyvér Harkó and István Sohár hosted a Hungarian hour on the student radio station that was broadcast from the same building.
In 1991 the first post-Communist government of Hungary signed an agreement with Rutgers for the establishment of the Institute for Hungarian Studies. As part of the agreement, the Institute sponsored guest lectures and Hungarian language courses. Declining enrollment and reduced funding led to the end of language instruction and Institute activities. The American Hungarian Educators Association has held five of its annual conferences at Rutgers and the Hungarian Foundation, from the first in 1976 to the 2024 conference commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the association's founding.