The Friends of Hungary Foundation awarded the “Friend of Hungary Award” for the sixth time in 2023. The award was established in 2016, and was awarded for the first time in May 2017.
Pál Schmidt, former Hungarian President, gave a speech entitled “Hungary: A Sports Nation” on the second day of the annual conference of the Friends of Hungary Foundation.
The 1968 and 1972 Olympic champion stressed that being a sporting nation is an integral part of the Hungarian identity and something we should be proud of. He pointed out that a gold medal is won in every Olympic Games in which a Hungarian athlete participates. Measured by the number of gold medals won per million inhabitants, Hungary is, along with Finland, the most successful country at the Olympic Games.
Pal Schmidt (Image: Hungary Today)
This indicates that Hungary is a true sporting nation, but 30 percent of Hungarian children do not play any sports at all. “We are not a sporting nation, and that is a painful truth,” says Pal Schmidt. But the government realized this and set goals to make Hungary a sporting nation. Uniquely in Europe, daily physical education is included in the curriculum and by the end of the eighth grade of primary school all students should be able to swim at least 200 metres.
Sports are also important for building community and making friends who can spread our good name in the world. The former president stressed that sports are also about children’s health, good mood and community building.
This year’s award winners
Professor Bella Boulobas
Professor Béla Bouloubas, the award-winning mathematician Széchenyi, received his PhD from Cambridge and became a lecturer at the university. He taught for over fifty years and his research was very diverse: he worked on combinatorics, random graphs, functional analysis, isometric inequalities, and additive number theory. He is the author of more than 450 scientific articles and 10 books and has taught more than 50 graduate students.
In addition to his academic work, the Friend of Hungary Award recognizes his decades of support for young Hungarians studying at Cambridge. He has awarded scholarships to a number of Hungarian students in the United Kingdom and the United States, with the hope that these students will enrich Hungarian academic life when they return to their homeland.
doctor. Judit Kerekes
doctor. Judit Kerekes, mathematician, teacher, and Girl Scout. She was invited to New York, where she accepted a teaching position and remained. She chaired the mathematics department at the City University of New York on Staten Island for 15 years. It organized numerous conferences and gave Hungarian scholars and professors the opportunity to present themselves in the United States.
doctor. Kerekes also stayed in touch with teacher training in Hungary, because she knew that Hungary was very good at teaching logical thinking, while the United States was very good at building students’ confidence, teaching them independence and putting theory into practice.
In addition to her work, she has always been active in the Hungarian-American community: General Secretary of the Hungarian-American Federation, Secretary of the Americans for Hungarians Foundation, Scoutmaster of the Hungarian Scouts Abroad Association, founder and co-chair of the Hungarian American Schools Meeting and member of the Diaspora Council. She was an actress and vice president of the Hungarian American Theater for two decades, and the director of the Hungarian International Summer School Camp for a decade.
doctor. Judit Kerekes (Photo: Hungary Today)
Joseph Komlosi
Joseph Komlosi was born on March 9, 1936. In 1962 he became a civil engineer in Switzerland. In 1996, he closed his planning office to devote himself entirely to the most important goal of his life: serving the global Hungarian people.
Since the mid-1980s, he has become increasingly involved in issues of international protection of minorities. He was instrumental in convincing the UN Human Rights Commission to condemn Romania for the destruction of villages, and as Secretary of the International Transylvania Commission, he organized aid shipments from Western Europe to Transylvania and Moldova after the fall of the Ceaușescu regime.
In 2004 he was awarded the Knight of the Hungarian Order of Merit by the Hungarian government and in 2016 he was awarded the Hungarian Order of Merit, civilian category. During the past decades, he published about 80 articles, studies and lectures. This year, a volume of his memoirs was published entitled “Time has caught up with me.”
Joseph Komlosy (Image: Hungary Today)
Hungarian Youth Association
The Hungarian Youth Association (HYA) was founded three years ago to represent the interests of Hungarian students studying in the diaspora and to strengthen their cultural ties with Hungary. Thanks to its extensive international network, the association is represented in more than 13 countries and 80 universities and reaches more than 7,000 students. The HYA organizing team currently consists of 85 volunteers who are self-studying at foreign universities.
Its activities include: national-level information events on study abroad opportunities that are also accessible to disadvantaged students, networking between students studying abroad and diaspora communities, and organizing community building and cultural activities. On their website, they have created a free country-specific brochure to help young Hungarians explore the international study options available to them.
Martin Bashthy and Balint Karadzic of the Hungarian Youth League (Photo: Hungary Today)
As part of the event, Balázs Gulyás, President of the Eötvös Loránd Research Network, gave a lecture in which he analyzed the current state of Hungarian research and science. According to him, one of the main goals is to encourage young people to pursue scientific careers.
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