COURAGE

łączymy kolekcje

Gabriella Lengyel (1948-) an activist of the Hungarian democratic opposition, sociologist, educator.

She was born in Budapest, his father was a radio mechanic had been running his own little shop, until it was ’nationalized’ by the Communist state. As a child she was a devoted member of the her school’s choir, and an extra for the National Theatre. In 1967 she started her studies at the Hungarian Actors Academy, but two years later she changed for studying history at Loránd Eötvös University, Budapest.

Through some friends she got in connection with the empirical research team of sociologist István Kemény and took part actively in the nationwide Roma survey from 1971, by visiting Gipsy families in the Trans-Danubian region. Inspirated by Kemény a year later she also started to study sociology at the university, as it was reintroduced legally in the curriculum of social sciences, and in the meantime she kept on being busy with her field researches. She received her MA degree in History in 1978 and in Sociology in 1981.

Gabriella remained a freelance sociologist up untill 1990, at the beginning to preserve her personal independence, and later because she failed to apply for state jobs, as a reknown activist of the opposition. During the 1980s she could not travel abroad either, as her claim for a passport was repeatedly refused by the police. In late 1979 she was one of the eight founding-members of SZETA, and the regular monthly meetings of activists for several years were held at her home in Miksa Déri street, in a workers’ district of Budapest. Apart from her sociological surveys and voluntary job done for SZETA she also took part in several activities of the dissident movement. She gave birth to her first child in 1984, and went on ’leave’ as an activist for a few years, but as the system was challenged by more and more radical changes, she herself reactivated. In 1987 she became a founding member, among others, of ’Asylum Committe’ a civilian organisation supported refugees fled from Ceausescu’s Romania, and was also an active organiser of the first independent Hungarian trade union, that of TDDSZ, ’Scientific Workers Democratic Union’ well before the political system changed.

Following 1990 she assisted her fiends became the member of Parieament Ottília Solt, and Gábor Havas to designe a new democratic social policy in Hungary. From 1993 she became one of the first educators of the newly established Social Worker Training School of John Wesley Theological College. After 1999 she returned to her field works as a freelance sociologist again, and conducted training courses of research methodology.

Eszter Leveleki was born in 1917. Her father was a factory director, and her mother worked as a teacher. She studied at the Szent Orsolya College, and in 1936 she started to work at the private kindergarten of Ms Márta Müller Nemes, who in the 1920s worked together with the Swiss psychiatrist Jean Piaget and gradually became one of the representatives of the reform pedagogy movement in Hungary. Leveleki also followed the pedagogical norms of Ferenc Mérei, who was an important figure in Hungarian social psychology. At the time, Waldorf and Montessori were the best-known alternative pedagogical methods.

Mirel Leventer (b. 25 December 1950, Bucharest) is a respected architect. He graduated from Ion-Luca Caragiale High School in 1969 and from the Ion Mincu Institute of Architecture in Bucharest (today the Ion Mincu University of Architecture and Urbanism) in 1975. He has a rich professional experience, and has taken many professional development courses both in Romania and abroad. Between 1985 and 1993, he lived in Israel. At present he has dual Romanian and Israeli citizenship. His architectural work includes a number of major buildings, both in Romania and abroad, including a considerable number in Israel. He is a member of Club A in Bucharest and was the coordinator of its cine-club between 1970 and 1975, when he was a student at the Faculty of Architecture.

His interests include advertising, video production, mountaineering, travel, and film history. He continues to take pleasure in taking photographs. It is a passion of his that goes back almost half a century: “I’ve been taking photographs since high school, in fact since the eighth grade. So, in a way, I’ve almost always liked taking photographs. Indeed, when I was at high school I took part in many photographic exhibitions for pupils. There was also a photography club at high school. In those days, photography clubs were little amateur institutions, where we learned what to do with a camera. We had a coordinator, who in our case was our physics teacher, but the clubs had no special connection with school. A club like that encouraged us to develop a particular passion; I could say that this was where the ‘first seeds’ of a passion were sown” – the passion that would later give rise to the unique collection of photographs and films connected to Club A.

Ante Lešaja is a retired full professor at the University of Zagreb. He was born in Korčula in 1931. Upon receiving a degree in economics in 1958, he started working at a shipyard in Korčula, where he was in charge of organising and analysing operations. He moved to the Institute of Economics Zagreb in 1962, where he dedicated himself to research in the field of economic policy and theory, company productivity as well as economic reforms in socialist countries. He received his Ph.D. at the Faculty of Economics and Business in Zagreb with his thesis “The Influence of the Means of Economic Policy on the Conditions of Earning.” By the end of 1972, he was promoted to associate professorial at the Institute of Economics in Zagreb, lecturing on political economy. Later he also taught political economy at the Faculty of Economics in Mostar and the Faculty of Special Education in Zagreb.
Besides research and teaching, he published his work regularly in journals. He translated the works of Czech economists (K. Kouba, Č. Kožušník, Z. Šulc, O. Turek, M. Pick), some of which were published, while others were used for the internal purposes of the Institute of Economics. Upon retirement in 1990, he worked as a volunteer for the town library in Korčula, and the unfortunate events of the destruction of library collections motivated him to conduct in-depth research into the phenomenon of book destruction in Croatia during the 1990s. The results of this research, which spanned over several years, can be found in the form of a study entitled Knjigocid – Uništavanje knjiga u Hrvatskoj 1990-ih (Libricide – The destruction of books in Croatia in the 1990s), Zagreb: Profil & SNV, 2012. He was particularly engaged, especially in the last 25 years, in the gathering of the collection related to the journal Praxis and the Korčula Summer School. The most important reasons for this engagement was the belief that the efforts and outreach of the Praxis thinkers are a vital component of the cultural heritage.