Egyháztörténeti Szemle 15. (2014)
2014 / 4. szám - SUMMARIES IN ENGLISH - Rajki Zoltán: Jehovah’s Witnesses and the Hungarian State Authorities between 1945 and 1989
Summaries in English 113 Adapting to the circumstances of unwilling illegality, Jehovah’s Witnesses gathered in their houses and continued their missionary activities. Jehovah’s Witnesses kept operating illegally in Hungaiy in the Kádár era, thus they did not fall under the supervision of the State Office for Church Affairs (ÁEH), but under law enforcement, as regulated by laws on assembly. To subvert them, Internal Affairs (IA) agencies initiated police procedures in the first years of sixties, and several of Jehovah’s witnesses were sentenced to prison by county courts. ÁEH officials started to address the issue of Jehovah’s Witnesses in 1962. In their judgement, the teachings of Jehovah’s Witnesses are full of anti-society views. Later from the second part of the sixties, neither the ÁEH, nor IA considered administrative moves as necessary. In fact, IA and ÁEH officials had talks with several leaders of Jehovah’s Witnesses from that time. They were still illegal, but in the 1970’s the ÁEH considered legal and administrative measures as practical only in well justified cases. Witnesses’ situation further improved in the second half of the 1980s. From 1985, they could legally discuss their convention materials at more sites in the country and their Vienna conventions could also be attended by more than thousand people as tourists, with consent from the authorities. Settling the legal situation of Jehovah’s Witnesses was not a simple process, but the negotiations with state and church leaders progresses and as a result, on June 27,1989, they were recognised by the state.
