The Friends of Hungary Foundation awards the Friend of Hungary Award for the sixth time in 2023. Established in 2016, the prize was awarded for the first time in May 2017 to Béla Lipták, leader of the Hungarian American Lobby, journalist Reinhard Olt and the Hungarian American Federation.

The Foundation's Board of Trustees is pleased to announce the winners of the 2023 Friend of Hungary Award. Congratulations to the winners, whose names and descriptions can be read below!

Prof. BÉLA BOLLOBÁS

Prof. Béla Bollobás, the Széchenyi Prize-winning mathematician, was born in Budapest on August 3, 1943.

He graduated in mathematics from ELTE and spent a year at Trinity College, Cambridge, during his studies, which had a great impact on him. He became a fellow of the Mathematical Research Institute and was granted permission to travel to England in 1969. He earned his PhD at Cambridge and then became a lecturer at the university. He has taught for over fifty years and his research is extremely diverse: he has worked on combinatorics, random graphs, functional analysis, isoperimetric inequalities, and additive number theory. He is the author of more than 450 scientific articles and 10 books, and has taught more than 50 PhD students.

In recognition of his work, he has been elected and invited as a professor by several universities. He was elected a member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, the Royal Society of England, and the Polish Academy of Sciences.

In addition to his academic work, the Friend of Hungary Award is given for his decades-long support for young Hungarians studying at Cambridge. He has won scholarships for a number of Hungarian students in the United Kingdom and the United States, in the hope that these students will enrich Hungarian academic life when they return home.

Dr. JUDIT KEREKES

Dr. Judit Kerekes, mathematician, educator, scout. She graduated from the University of Szeged and received her PhD from the University of ELTE. She taught, among others, at the Kecskemét College of Education and, after giving a lecture in Krems, Austria, she was invited to New York, where she accepted a teaching position and stayed. She chaired the Department of Mathematics at the City University of New York Collage of Staten Island for 15 years. She organized several conferences and provided opportunities for Hungarian scientists and professors to present themselves in the United States.

Her American career path has been unbroken for fifty years. She also stayed in constant contact with teacher education in Hungary, knowing that Hungary was very good at teaching logical thinking, while the U.S. was very good at building students' confidence, teaching them to be independent, and putting theory into practice.

In addition to her work, she has always been active in the Hungarian American community: general secretary of the American Hungarian Federation, trustee of the Americans for Hungarians Foundation, scout commissioner of the Association of Hungarian Scouts Abroad, 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 Theatre for two decades, and a camp director and principal of the Summer Hungarian International School Camp for a decade.

She has received numerous awards in Hungary and the United States.

JÓZSEF KOMLÓSSY

József Komlóssy was born on March 9, 1936. After his primary education he graduated from the Forestry College in Debrecen, and from 1954 he started his higher education at the Forestry Engineering College in Sopron. Here he heard about the revolution and became an active participant. To escape the repressive measures, he fled with his classmates and part of the teaching staff to Canada, where practical classical forestry in the European sense was introduced.  In 1962, he moved to Switzerland, where he worked as a civil engineer. In 1996 he closed his planning office in order to devote himself entirely to his most important goal in life: to serve the universal Hungarian people.

From the mid-1980s, he became increasingly involved in international minority protection issues. He was instrumental in getting the UN Human Rights Committee to condemn Romania for the demolition of villages, and as secretary of the International Transylvania Committee, he organized aid shipments from Western Europe to Transylvania and Moldova after the fall of the Ceauşescu regime.

In 2004, he was awarded the Knight's Cross of the Order of Merit of the Republic of Hungary by the Hungarian government, and in 2016 he was awarded the Hungarian Order of Merit, civilian category. In the past decades, he has published about 80 articles, studies and lectures. This year saw the publication of a volume based on his memoirs, entitled Time Has Caught Up with Me.

HUNGARIAN YOUTH ASSOCIATION

The Hungarian Youth Association was founded three years ago to represent the interests of Hungarian students studying in the diaspora and to promote their cultural ties to Hungary. Thanks to its extensive international network, the organization is represented in more than 13 countries and 80 universities, reaching more than 7000 students. HYA's organizational team currently consists of 85 volunteers who are themselves students of universities abroad.

Their activities include: nationwide information sessions about study abroad opportunities that are also accessible to disadvantaged students, networking among 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 their international study options.

They help college graduates launch their careers and make a name for themselves in Hungary. Through their career-oriented presentations, they promote opportunities in the Hungarian job market and provide contacts with Hungarian companies to help them find employment.

Together with their Polish partner organization, they launched an EU petition to ensure that the drastic increase in tuition fees in the United Kingdom after Brexit is not an obstacle for young people in the European Union. In 2022, Forbes magazine included them in the list of the 30 most successful Hungarians under 30.

Previous winners:

2018:

• Marika Radda, President of Club Pannonia
• Annamária Heddadné Nagy, Presbyter of the Hungarian Reformed Congregation in Paris
• Andrea Lauer Rice and Réka Pigniczky for the visual archive of the Memory Project

2019:

• Zsolt Bede-Fazekas, Editor-in-Chief of Independent Hungarian Radio Toronto
• Christopher Ball, Honorary Consul of Hungary in Connecticut
• Hungarian Scout Association Abroad

2020:

• Miklós Czaun, President of the US West Coast Club of Hungarian Scientists
• Annamária Friedrich Ireghy, President of the Association of Hamburg Hungarians
• Andreas Unterberger, journalist

2021:

• Anikó Gaál-Schott, „the bridge between Hungary and the Washington region"
• Zsuzsánna Haynalné Kesserű, journalist
• Vienna Europe Club

2022:

• János Miska, founder of the János Miska Canadian Hungarian Literary Archive
• Dr. Suzanne Papp Aykler, President of the Rákóczi Foundation of Canada
• Hungarian American Coalition