Zoltán Béky, The First Hungarian American Bishop: From Sárospatak to Washington, DC

Type of Abstract (select): Paper presentation

Abstract (max. 250 words):
Zoltán Béky (1903-1978) was a native of Abauj County, experienced the end of Dualist Hungary, and graduated from the Reformed high school and seminary in Sárospatak in interwar Hungary. He came to the United States as a postgraduate student at the New Brunswick Theological Seminary and was then in 1928 was elected pastor of the Free Magyar Reformed Church in Trenton, New Jersey. He served this congregation for 37 years, rising to Dean and then Arch Dean of his denomination. In 1958 the denomination adopted its present name, Hungarian Reformed Church in America, and elected Béky its first bishop. He represented his church in assemblies of the World Council of Churches, and from 1964 presided over the Hungarian Reformed Federation of America in Washington, DC. The Free Magyar Reformed Church was one of several Protestant denominations in the US with Hungarian congregations, but the only one with an exclusively Hungarian character. The presentation proposes to examine the course of Béky’s career and that of his church in the light of his papers, which are preserved in the Hungarian Heritage Center in New Brunswick, and the freely available digitized issues of the FMRC’s newspaper, Magyar Egyház. Both resources have been largely neglected by historical scholarship. We will seek to understand how Béky’s leadership affected the independence and the increasingly ecumenical orientation of the Hungarian Reformed Church in the United States.


Brief Professional Bio (max. 100 words):
James P. (Jim) Niessen earned his Ph.D at Indiana University with a dissertation on religion and politics in nineteenth century Transylvania. He has published several studies on the Romanian and Hungarian national movements. Since 2001 he is World History Librarian at Rutgers University, and he supervised the digitization at Rutgers of papers related to the Hungarian refugees at Camp Kilmer. His recent research has focused on Hungarians in the Cold War and collections for the study of Hungarian Americans. In 2023 he published a review in Hungarian Cultural Studies and gave a paper at ASEEES on Hungarian American research collections.