IN MEMORIAM:
Ruth Ghering Biro, PhD (1940-2021), founding member of AHEA, passed away on December 12, 2021, of natural causes and complications from several surgeries.
Ruth G. Biro, was born in Butler Pa, on August 7, 1940 to Dr. Leonard G. Ghering (of German, Dutch, French, and English heritage), and Jenny Elizabeth Lind Ghering (of Swedish and Finnish ancestry). Later she would learn through DNA that this was only half of her ancestral lineage.
Dr. Biro earned her B.A. in political science and secondary education at Chatham College, an MLS in library science (international comparative librarianship and K-12 level). and Ph.D. in
Higher Education Curriculum (with cognate child development) from the University of Pittsburgh on the subject of teachers choosing good children's literature. Her senior college tutorial topic was the legal status of Communists in the USA 1956-62. Her master's paper was on 15th Century Hungarian Bibliophile Matthias Corvinus. She made her first trip to Hungary in 1966 with her then husband (Dr. William L. Biro) and her sister Ann Flynn. After seeing the ruins from WWII and the Hungarian Revolution, she decided to learn more about Hungary, which was little known to American students in the aftermath of WWII and during the Cold War era.
Dr. Biro first concentrated on Hungarian children’s and adolescence literature. For forty-seven years, Dr. Biro was with Duquesne University as a reference librarian in the University Library, African Collection librarian, and professor in the School of Education, where she taught Library Science courses, Children’s and Adolescent Literature, Cultural Diversity, Intercultural Education, Multicultural and International Literature, Perspectives on the Holocaust, and doctoral courses, among others. In three sabbaticals to Hungary, she expanded her research to include the humanitarian mission of Raoul Wallenberg to save Jews in Budapest under the auspices of the War Refugee Board of President Roosevelt in the Holocaust of WWII; women survivors of the Holocaust who immigrated to the USA and wrote books on their experiences for American youth; and books for American students on Hungarian themes. She delivered presentations on these and related topics in the United States, Canada, Hungary, Poland, and Israel.
Between 1979 and 2006, Dr. Biro made twenty trips to Hungary where she attended conferences, conducted research, and traveled widely throughout the nation. In the 1980's she studied Hungarian Language and Culture at Debrecen Summer School, and later co- authored a bilingual picture dictionary with Miklós Kontra and Zsófia Radnai entitled Hungarian Picture Dictionary for Young Americans (Budapest: Tankönyvkiadó, 1989), which was published two weeks before the fall of the Berlin Wall and the new freedom from Communism for Hungary.
In 1990 and 1991, she directed two Fulbright-Hays Group Projects to Hungary at Pécs under the auspices of the US Department of Education. For the first grant period, there were fourteen faculty members in different disciplines from four area universities, and for the second grant seven K-12 teachers and seven education faculty participants. Each group spent six weeks with three USA leaders and three Hungarian team leaders in selected locales in Hungary where they attended lectures and gathered information and materials to develop curriculum on Hungarian topics pertaining to their instructional level to use in their home institutions to disseminate to others, and to offer presentations to educational institutions, professional and scholarly organizations, and community sites.
American Hungarian Educators Association members served as co-directors of the project: Márta Pereszlényi-Pintér in 1990 and Julianna Nádas Ludányi in 1991. In both years, AHEA member Elizabeth Simon of the University of Pittsburgh served as native informant. In her trips to Hungary in the decades of the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s, Dr. Biro presented at AHEA conferences, International Association of Hungarian Studies, the International Reading Association, among several other venues.In 1980-81, Dr. Biro served as curriculum coordinator of the study of Hungarian Americans in Pittsburgh, an Ethnic Heritage Grant study directed by AHEA member Paul Body awarded under the US Office of Education. She authored three of the ten booklets in the study entitled: (#1) Children’s Hungarian Heritage; (#5) Hungarian Folk Traditions Revisited; and (# 9) Bibliographical Guide to Hungarian-American Sources.
In 1988, Dr. Biro was selected as a participant in the Fulbright Hays Group Project Abroad to Austria, Hungary, and Yugoslavia under the US Department of Education.From 1996-2004, Dr. Biro was awarded a Summer Faculty Associate, Russian and East European Institute, at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana, for a two-week program each year sponsored by the U.S. State Department and the U.S. Office of Education, Her topics were: 1996: “Hungary in American Literature for Children and Young Adults,”1997: “Literature for Children and Young Adults on Hungary during WWII and Its Aftermath,” 1998: “Raoul Wallenberg: Swede Serving US War Refugee Board in Hungary in World War II,” 1999: “Children in World War II: A Comparison through Literature of Life in Hungary with the Situation in Other Eastern European Countries, 1939-1945,”2001 “Literature Pertaining to the Experiences of Youth in Hungary during the Holocaust,” 2002: “Literature and Resources on the Hungarian Holocaust for Secondary and Collegiate Educators,” 2003: “Literature and Resources Pertaining to the Auschwitz Experience of Hungarian Youth, 1944-1945,”2004: “Leadership Attributes of Raoul Wallenberg in Resisting the Nazis and the Arrow Cross in Budapest during the Hungarian Holocaust of 1944-1945.”Dr. Biro also engaged in other international projects.
In 1992, 1993, and 1995, Dr. Biro taught Duquesne University students in summer programs in schools in the Lake District in England. From 2000-2006, she taught in Italy in seven semester or summer programs in Rome for Duquesne University undergraduate, graduate, and doctoral students. In 2000, she led a group of graduate and doctoral students in a month long Holocaust seminar at the International School of Holocaust Studies at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, Israel.
She also attended a Yad Vashem seminar in 1998-1999 and Conferences in 1999 and 2008. Dr. Biro earned two certificates in Holocaust Studies, in 1998-1999 and 2000. In her research at Yad Vashem’s Department of the Righteous, she examined the files of several designated Hungarian Righteous Gentiles and Hungarian Holocaust rescuers honored from other nations. She made four trips to Poland and addressed the Legacy of the Holocaust programs at Jagiellonian University in Krakow, where her presentations on the Hungarian Holocaust were published by their university press.A founding member of the American Hungarian Educators Association in 1974, Dr. Biro was awarded the Peter Basa Award of the AHEA in 2012 for her contributions to the organization. She served the AHEA as an officer, conference organizer, session organizer/chair, and presenter, and she participated in developing grants, initiating exchange programs, hosting visiting scholars, representing the AHEA at Hungarian conferences, and was involved in many other association activities.
On the occasion in 2012 of the celebration of what would have been the 100th anniversary of Wallenberg’s birth, Dr. Biro’s 2004 paper entitled “Raoul Wallenberg: Commemorating His Moral Courage in the Holocaust in the Nations of Hungary, Sweden, Israel, and the USA” [ed. by Zygmunt Mazur] by Jagellonian Press (36pp.) was included in the Raoul Wallenberg Year Bibliography in Hungary, and in the OSZK, Hungary’s National Library. She also supervised Duquesne University student teachers in several sites in Ireland in 2008.In the last decade of Dr. Biro’s life, she returned to Butler, Pennsylvania where she accessed family information and researched through her DNA indicators the history of her heritage, family tree, migration routes and settlements of her ancestry.
She discovered that she knew only 49% of her ancestry before the DNA results and the other 51% of her heritage emerged only after the test.In 2017, she learned her background lineage included 24% Eastern European (and five hundred years of Hungarian Transylvanian heritage) and a 6% Jewish Diaspora segment, both portions previously unknown. Now with the ability to tell one’s fortune backwards, the ancestry study surprisingly revealed that her research interests in historical Hungary and the Hungarian Holocaust had been in her DNA all along, although not known to her until very recently.
Dr. Biro’s articles, papers, book reviews, presentations, and other professional activities in teaching and research fields are listed on her comprehensive resume.
She is survived by John (János) Major of Pittsburgh PA, her partner of more than 30 years; a brother, John Martin Ghering ( Ellen) of Flowery Branch GA; a sister, Ann Ghering Flynn (John) of South Pasadena, CA; nieces Tina Ghering Hackney (Scott) of Flowery Branch GA, and Jennifer Flynn Case (Matthew) of Los Angeles; and nephew Timothy Anthony Flynn (Clare) of Manhattan Beach CA. John Major is staying with longtime colleague and family friend Dr. Margaret Ford in New Hampshire during the Coronavirus crisis. Dr. Ford may be contacted for additional information:drpegford@gmail.com, 1125 Quincy Rd., Rumney, NH 03266, (603) 851-1800.Dr. Biro's funeral arrangements and obituary from her family can be accessed at:
https://www.legacy.com/us/obituaries/butlereagle/name/ruth-biro-obituary?pid=200943231