The Museum is open to visitors on Wednesdays, Thursdays and Fridays, 11-3., and those Saturdays when we have a program at the Museum. If you would like to visit us on another day when we are not open, you can make an appointment by writing a message to our email address, museum@clevelandhungarianmuseum.org, and we will answer your email and arrange for your visit.  Please give us at least a 4 day notice!

Please note that temporarily there are two sure ways of accessing the Museum in the Galleria. One is through the East 12th entrance, and the other is if you park in the Galleria garage off of Lakeside Avenue, you can use the elevator in the garage which will take you up to the street level where the Museum is located.

The Cleveland Hungarian Heritage Society's Annual Meeting took place on February 26th at the Museum. Reports to the membership were given by the President, Tax Advisor, Curator Treasurer and Endowment Committee Chairman. The membership elected 10 Directors for 3 year terms and 4 Officers (President- János Szigeti ,Vice-President-Bea Tabor, Secretary-Zsuzsanna Gyori and Treasurer-Hajnalka Kezdi) for a 1 year term. For a full list of our Board of Directors please refer to the Home tab on our website and click on "Meet the Directors and Committee Members".

Did you know that the Cleveland Hungarian Heritage Society was incorporated as a non-profit corporation over 40 years ago?  The mission of the founders was to support a museum that would preserve the history of the Hungarian immigrant community in Northeast, Ohio, and would showcase Hungarian culture through its collection of fine art, folk art, books, and archival material. Since 1985, our collection has grown, our exhibits have embraced many topics, and our library has over 8000 volumes. Interactive computers enrich our exhibits, and our regular programming covers a broad range of topics. We have hosted children, high school students, college students, family reunions, political dignitaries, and the thousands of visitors who have come through our Székely gate to view our collection. With the support of our community, we have grown into a first class cultural gem located in downtown Cleveland, and we are celebrating this milestone this year. Come visit us!

Wonderful works of art by László Csomortáni Gál will grace the walls our Museum. The artist was born in 1978 in Csíkszereda, Romania, a city in Transylvania, home to a large Hungarian population. He grew up in Csíkcsomortán, in a rural environment. He has chosen to continue to follow a simple lifestyle in a state close to nature, which is a great source of inspiration for him. He graduated from the Nagy István Art Lyceum in Csikszereda in 1996, then completed studies in the Sculpture Department of the University of Fine Arts in Oradea in 2003. Since then, he has been living and creating in his native village. László Csomortáni Gál is inspired by the character of multi-decades old wooden planks and his reverence for the past. He creates images that harken back to an ancient Hungarian world incorporating archaic prayers, incantations and church and folk songs into the titles of his creations. He has had more than fifty solo exhibitions mainly in Hungary and Transylvania; among them Budapest, Szentendre, Esztergom, Oradea, Cluj-Napoca, Sepsiszentgyörgy, Székelyudvarhely, Gyergyószentmiklós, Szekelykeresztur, Csíkszereda.. and even in several smaller settlements. This past Fall, he was invited to exhibit his works in New York, Los Angeles, Toronto, and Munich.

The Museum is located in the Galleria in Downtown Cleveland and will be open from 12 o’clock. 

Parking is available in the Galleria underground garage.

Suggested donation is $10 for adults and $5 for students.

A viszontlátásra!!!! See you soon!!!!

It was so good to see many members of the Hungarian Community hearing about the use of our ancient language in this particular diaspora. Our guest speaker and researcher was Dr. Krisztina Fehér, who was introduced by Mrs. Kuni Nádas, a member of the Museum’s Program Committee.

Dr. Fehér was still in Hungary in 2021 when she started research on the Cleveland area which has the largest Hungarian community in the U.S.  One of the reasons she considered this study is because she felt that although there were books published on the history and culture of Hungarian communities, there were none on the language use itself.

Her study included those persons who were familiar with the Hungarian language, or had Hungarian heritage and lived in the Cleveland area. Her subjects were children between the ages of 6-17 and teachers in the Hungarian schools.

Her study was a complex analysis with charts and categorizations to explain her course of action and its results about the children and teachers. She did field observations, linguistic landscape study, classroom observation and background questionnaires. She used the questionnaire format on two groups. In the first group (from parents) she had 544 submissions to an online questionnaire sent to participants throughout the United States. The second group of 68 participants (from students , parents and teachers) was limited to the Cleveland area The first group yielded quantitative subjective data and the second qualitative objective data. She also wrote about switching and mixing in the two languages.

There was so much more information. However, these are some of her findings:

• In the teachers’ group she found that there was more mixing of the two languages rather than switching the two. There was an element of judgement in the switching.
• In the students’ group, she indicated students preferred English and the switching was more common.
• Sample of Code-mixing is the phrase “Buckeye Magyar”
• “Formal forms” of the language has begun to disappear.
• Distinction between formal and casual use was discussed.

She also mentioned that there exists a bi-lingual mode in the brain and that the more bi-lingual a person is the more code-mixing there is. Also mentioned during the audience participation was that the language of counting determines the dominant language.