In a city that has been a historic gateway to immigrants, the American-Hungarian Museum in Passaic is about to close its doors, squeezed out of the Reid Memorial Library by a modern-day budget crunch.
The museum, which has occupied most of the second floor of the library since the early 1980s, has until March 31 to pack up and move out. Strapped for cash, the Passaic Library Board of Trustees recently signed an agreement to lease space to the Passaic Board of Education.
“The library right now is running in the red,” said library trustee Walter Porto. “So we were obligated to be creative.”
Porta estimated this year’s deficit at $98,000. To help close the gap, the library in late January agreed to lease second-floor space at the Reid library and the basement at the Julius Forstmann Library across town on Gregory Avenue to the Passaic Board of Education for $71,000 a year.
“We needed the money, and they needed the space,” Porto said.
The sudden eviction caught the American-Hungarian Museum by surprise and left little time to find another location. Museum director Kalman Magyar said the collection of folk constumes, carved eggs, ornaments and lace is being packed up and sent into storage.
“We don’t like it, but that is life,” Magyar said. “The city has been very good to us over the years.”
Established in 1981, the American-Hungarian Museum paid the library $1 a year for rent, a cozy arrangement that was as much a tribute to the generations of Hungarian immigrants who came to Passaic in the 20th century. Fleeing oppression and tyranny in the homeland, Hungarians flooded the neighborhood along the Passaic River known as Lower Dundee, bumping up against other Eastern European groups, including Poles, Russians and Ukrainians.
Passaic city historian Mark Auerbach said the immigrants were lured by the promise of jobs in the city’s factories and mills.
“The mills needed skilled labor,” Auerbach said. “So the mills used to send agents over to Europe to recruit workers. They came because Passaic had employment, and it had the community.”
Those mills are mostly gone now, and so is much of the Hungarian population, with many of those who remain living in Clifton and Garfield. The neighborhood around the Reid Library is now mainly Mexican.
Magyar said the lease deal caught the museum somewhat by surprise. Volunteers have spent the past several weeks clearing out the display cases and taking various paintings and relics from the wall.
Among the oddball items is a wild boar pelt — with its short, curled tusks — and an ornately decorated shepherd’s coat that looks to be 100 years old.
“Everything is now in boxes and headed for storage,” Magyar said.
The boxes hold bits and pieces of the cultural history of Hungarian people, dating to the collapse of the Roman Empire and including a goulash of ethnic influences. Centuries of conquest and conflict between Hungarians, Russians, Germans and Slavs has meant shifting alliances and borders.
One volunteer, Lazlo Kerkay of Garfield, was packing boxes on a recent afternoon. He stopped to look at an old map of Hungary. Kerkay noted that at one time or another, Croatia, Serbia, Czechoslovakia and Romania were all part of Hungary.
“Now, we’re the only country that is ‘surrounded by itself,’ ” Kerkay said of life without the lost lands.
The museum also tells the story of the Hungarian struggle for freedom and against Communism. Among the artifacts being stuffed into boxes are photographs and written accounts of the uprising against the Soviets in 1956 known as the Hungarian Revolution.
One of the artifacts is a large leather coat, a drab and rather non-descript piece of clothing that would be no one’s idea of a fashion statement. But it said much more, and Kerkay knew what it meant.
“It belonged to man named Julius Bikkal,” Kerkay explained. “He was a freedom fighter. And this is the coat that he was wearing when he escaped from Hungary into Austria.”
Porto said the Board of Education will use the space at Reid library for offices and the basement at Forstmann Library for storage.
A room on the second floor of the Reid Library that contains the city of Passaic’s historical archives will not be affected, Porto said.
Email: cowenr@northjersey.com
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