The Museum is open to visitors on Wednesdays, Thursdays and Fridays, 11-3. We will be closed on Friday, July 4th. 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!

We are pleased to announce that we have been awarded a grant by the Hungarian Government through the Bethlen Gábor Fund Management, in support of our efforts to share with the greater community our Hungarian culture and history and the Hungarian immigrant story of Northeast, Ohio.

Did you know that the Cleveland Hungarian Heritage Society was incorporated as a non-profit corporation 40 years ago?  A new exhibit will highlights our 40 year history.  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!

To say we had a wonderful party would be an understatement. Simply put, we had a great turnout, great music by Harmonia, generous donations to our Fund-A-Need campaign, some really fine wines, tasty treats both savory and sweet, but most of all, a lot of good wishes that came our way on Saturday. Our president assembled a very fine Committee which set about organizing the 40th Anniversary event. The Committee dealt with programming, grabbing live music

for the day,  the new exhibit, the refreshments, the location of chairs and tables, a sound system, publicity, interviews on radio programs, printing of flyers, having the Museum cleaned so that it sparkled in the sunlight on Saturday, and many many more details. In the meantime, the Museum continued to be open as usual. That's a lot of volunteer hours!

Thanks to our 40th Anniversary Committee members who worked tirelessly on this major event. We are grateful to Fr. Richard Bona for his heartfelt invocation to start our program. We thank Bálint Bakondi from the Hungarian Consulate in Chicago who drove to Cleveland to address our guests on behalf of the Magyar government, and thanks to Jacqueline Kassouf, who greeted our guests on behalf of the Galleria. We welcomed many distinguished guests including Ralph Perk, president of the Nationalities Movement, and many organizational heads who are on our Honorary Board. Members who attended included Dr. Jeanette Grasselli Brown, Dr. John Nádas, Elizabeth Papp Taylor, Ken Kovach, Krisztina Nádas; and organizations such as the Akron Magyar Club was represented by Lajos Verhás, the Hungarian Cultural Center of Northeast Ohio was represented by Mary Jane Molnar, Richard Sarosi represented the William Penn Association, and the Clevelandi Magyarokért Foundation was represented by Loránd Csibi. Thank you to the members of Harmonia for the live music, as well as László Tihanyi and KCsP fellow, Zsófia Vágvölgyi, for  the dance that enriched our program.

On Saturday, April 12^th, the Museum hosted a program featuring Nicholas Boros, whose presentation on Hungarian shrines in the United States proved to be a memorable presentation.

We had a sneaking suspicion that this program would be well-attended, and it was!! (You know that is the case when we have to bring in more old chairs from the storage room.) Nicholas (Miklós) Boros met every expectation that we had for this program. Beautifully researched, expertly delivered, he managed to summarize the history of so many of the Hungarian shrines that many of us have visited: The Shrine of Our Lady of Perpetual Help in Orange Village, the Máriapócs Shrines in Burton, Ohio and Matawan, New Jersey, the Shrine of Our Lady Comforter of the Afflicted in Youngstown, and St. Elizabeth of Hungary in Cleveland, Ohio.

The audience was able not only to see the photos of the various shrines, but also viewed the many historical newspaper articles and anniversary booklets illustrating the dedications of the shrines, describing how they were established, how some are shrines that are no longer served by Hungarian clergy, and how some are no longer in existence.

We had a good Q & A session following his presentation and we could see that people were engaged in conversation with Nicholas well after the program ended. We are not sure he had a chance to taste any of the treats on the refreshment table!

On Saturday afternoon, March 8th,  we had a Hungarian language program at the Museum. It was well-attended and well-received! Our speaker, Ildikó Antal-Ferencz, is a freelance journalist who spent almost 3 years in the U.S. Her husband's job landed the family in New Jersey, and she spent a significant portion of those years interviewing Hungarians living in the diaspora. Their stories encompass three volumes in Hungarian, and 2 volumes in English, containing roughly 106 interviews with Hungarian-Americans residing anywhere from east coast, west coast and many states in between.  Many of us sitting in the seats thought we knew how other members of the diaspora lived their magyar identity, but listening to Ildikó, you realized that our magyar communities have active members of different ages and interests. We had some out of town attendees, who were very complimentary of our Museum and its collection, library. Questions and answers were followed by refreshments and a book signing by Ildikó.