Hungarian Studies Newsletter, 1998 (15. évfolyam, 51-54. szám)
1998 / 53-54. szám
Left to right: George Washington Award Laureates: Zoltán Merszei, 1976; Bruce Gelb, 1997; George Jelűnek, 1986; Rabbi Arthur Schneier and László Papp, 1998. George Washington Awards (Continued) He is currently chairman of Papp Architects, P.C., in White Plains, N.Y. He was regional director of the American Institute of Architects and president of the New York State Association of Architects. In addition, he serves as chairman of the Board of the Westchester County Chamber of Commerce, regional president of the World Federation of Hungarians, and a councilman for the city of New Canann, Conn. His fellow Washington award recipient, Rabbi Schneier, has been the spiritual leader of the Park East Synagogue in New York City since 1962. He is founder and president of the Appeal of Conscience Foundation; as such he has met with many U.S. presidents, foreign prime ministers and religious leaders from more than 20 countries. Most recently, President Clinton appointed him to be one of three U.S. religious leaders to examine the life of religious communities in China and Tibet. The delegation met with Chinese President Jiang Zemin and produced the first official dialogue on religious freedom between China and the U.S. In 1978 Rabbi Schneier was a member of the U.S. Presidential Delegation for the return of the Crown of St. Stephen to Hungary. He was deeply involved in the peace process in the former Yugoslavia, convening a religious summit in 1992 and the 1995 conflict resolution conference in Vienna, which planted the seeds for the Dayton Peace Accord. Born in Vienna, Rabbi Schneier later lived under Nazi occupation in Budapest during World War II. He now serves as the spiritual leader of the World Federation of Hungarian Jews. FOUNDATION NEWS AND NOTES Andrea Horvath Alstrup, member of the Board of Directors of the American Hungarian Foundation, was honored in December, 1998, as Advertising Woman of the Year by Advertising Women of New York, an organization of female advertising professionals. She is vice president of corporate advertising for Johnson & Johnson and handles a $1 billion a year advertising budget. Mrs. Alstrup was so honored because of her efforts to encourage television executives to produce more family-friendly programs. The former Andrea Horvath started her career at Johnson & Johnson as a high school work-study student. In 1999 with a grant from the American Association of Museums, the Museum of the American Hungarian Foundation will be studied and evaluated in the first of a series of assessments by an outside consulting expert under the AAM program called MAP 1 (Museum Assessment Program). The report, prepared by the consultant for the Foundation's Board of Directors, will assist in the Board’s strategic planning for the Foundation and to further develop the Museum of the Foundation and its services. Matching corporate gifts to the American Hungarian Foundation have increased annually. More donors are recognizing that their contributions to the Foundation can be matched/doubled or tripled by their firm's own corporate matching gifts program. Among the numerous firms that have matched their employee's gifts to the American Hungarian Foundation are the following: Johnson & Johnson, Unilever, AT&T, IBM, Time Warner, The Chase Manhattan Foundation, The Prudential Foundation and others. Suzanne Szász Exhibition Her Life and Photographs From Sunday, October 18, 1998 to January 31, 1999 the Museum of the American Hungarian Foundation hosted a retrospective Exhibition honoring Suzanne Szász. This was the second exhibit of her photography hosted by the Museum. In 1990 the Museum featured her photographic essay on the Hungarian community of New Brunswick, New Jersey. The present exhibit was more inclusive of her life work and included photos of most of her favorite subjects. Although she is known primarily as a photographer of children and is a superb chronicler of family life, her other subjects include landscapes, community, the appreciation of beauty as it can be encountered in ordinary things, as for example a clothesline or a cat peering through the drapes. The exhibition presented her career as a photojournalist but also showed her early photos and the passionate interests of her rich and colorful life. Suzanne Székely was born in Budapest in 1915, and acquired her name by which she became known in the world of photography from Alexander Szász, whom she married at the age of seventeen. World War II and her husband's diplomatic assignment in Washington D C. brought her to the United States. When their marriage ended, Suzanne turned to photography as a career. She made a name for herself as a free-lance photographer and had her first article published in Popular Photography in 1947. She had a unique talent for capturing a story in pictures and won recognition for her work by having her photos and photographic essays published in Ladies Home journal, Look, Woman's Home Companion, Life, McCalls, Colliers, This Week and Parents Magazine. She published (Continued on page 4) Directors of the American Hungarian Foundation at the 1998 George Washington Awards dinner: (1 to rj Bela B. Lukacs, Dr. Lajos Schmidt, Paul J. Kellner, Prof. August J. Molnár and Zoltán Merszei. NO. 53-54, AUTUMN-WINTER, 1998-99, HUNGARIAN STUDIES NEWSLETTER 3
