President Donald Trump recently unveiled new sanctions against Russian officials, businesses and agencies. One of the prominent names on the list of targeted oligarchs is 50-year-old Oleg Deripaska, a Russian billionaire. Deipaska has links to former Trump-campaign boss Paul Manafort, who is awaiting trial on money laundering and conspiracy charges lodged against him by special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of […]
Joe Gunn is the Executive Director of a Christian faith-based public policy organization in the Canadian capital, Ottawa, called Citizens for Public Justice (CPJ). His group’s advocacy work in democratic reform, anti-poverty initiatives, refugee rights and ecological justice are initiatives valued by HFP, as well as by many civil society organizations in Hungary–though admittedly, in the Hungarian context the faith-based […]
My father, Arthur Schwartz, arrived in Canada 70 years ago as one of the 1,123 Jewish orphans that Canada admitted after the Holocaust. Born in Kosice, Czechoslovakia, in 1923, he grew up in an Orthodox Jewish working-class family. In 1938, Kosice was annexed to Hungary. Hungarian Jews were subjected to persecution and anti-Semitic laws such as work restrictions and the […]
Hungarians are more accustomed to the disappearance of major print publications than Canadians, particularly after the ruling party’s shuttering by proxy of the nation’s largest circulation daily, Népszabadság. Canadians have also been more avid readers of news in print than Hungarians, where even the nation’s largest national daily, the conservative Magyar Nemzet, has less than 22,000 subscribers and readers of the […]
Bill S -226, which recently passed both the Senate and the House of Commons in Canada, may cause some sleepless nights for Hungarian strongman, Viktor Orbán, as he races towards an unprecedented third consecutive term in office in Hungary’s upcoming national elections. It may also have some unintended side-effects on the investigation into Russia’s intervention into last year’s US presidential […]
Statistics Canada released numbers pertaining to ethnicity and immigration from the 2016 census this week, including revealing data on the number of Canadians who listed Hungarian as their sole ethno-cultural background, or one of several. There is one number, which can be misleading and is often used to justify the Hungarian government’s significant public spending in Hungarian-Canadian communities. This includes […]
Ottawa’s Saint Paul University was the site of the opening day of a conference organised on the sixtieth anniversary of the arrival of the vast majority of Hungarian refugees to Canada and in the year of the 150th anniversary of Canadian confederation. Mike Molloy, President of the Canadian Immigration Historical Society, opened the conference by reading the greetings from Ahmed Hussen, […]
This three-day conference (October 21-23, 2017) explores Canada’s involvement in the central issue of our time: the global search by refugees for a safe home in light of this country’s history of immigration and nation-building. Recognizing Canada’s 150th celebrations and also the 60th anniversary of the arrival and settlement of 38,000 Hungarian refugees during 1957, this conference uses their example […]
We remember Ervin Nyíregyházi, the Hungarian-American pianist and composer. Considered a “lost genius” as he is one of the lesser known or forgotten Hungarian immigrants in North America. Ervin Nyíregyházi was born in 1903 in Budapest. Ervin tried to sing before he was one year old, sang tunes before he was two and was able to play almost every song […]
In 2011, István Kamarás–formerly employed by the Christian Democratic People’s Party’s (KDNP) Barankovics Foundation–claimed refugee status in Canada, noting that he no longer wanted to “lend his name to the government’s actions that oppress Gypsies.” He added that he is “forced to emigrate from the country” and is “forced to accept in his heart the centuries-long hopelessness of the Gypsy […]
