Changes in Hungary Echo Through N.Y. Neighborhood : Migration: Young immigrants are building nest eggs in Manhattan’s Yorkville area while retirees are returning to their homeland.

NEW YORK —  Some of the gleaming copper boxes tucked in the dim nave of the First Hungarian Reformed Church are empty now. The ashes of those who refused to be buried in a Communist Hungary have been returned to their newly free homeland.

Down the street, Edward Weiss gets a knock on his door about once a week from a just-arrived young Hungarian looking for work in his family’s 100-year-old specialty food shop.

And some longtime refugees are stretching their retirement pensions by returning to their homeland.

With the fall of the Communist government in Hungary, there’s new movement in Yorkville, the corner of Manhattan’s Upper East Side where Hungarians have flocked for more than a century.

Little remains of the bustling enclave of tenements, breweries and pastry shops that Hungarians once shared with Germans, Czechs and Poles. Most immigrants have moved out, or they were forced to flee spiraling real estate prices.

But the Hungarians--whether they live in Yorkville or simply come back to dance, to gossip or to worship--retain the most vibrant ethnic community in the half-square-mile area. And the changes in their homeland have given it a boost.

“There’s much more back and forth,” said Andrew Tothy, an investment banker who came to New York as a child with his parents in 1950. “It’s not nearly as insular a community as it used to be.”

Along with young immigrants seeking nest eggs to bring back to Hungary, new freedoms in the old country are attracting an increasing number of visitors to Yorkville, from politicians to singers.

Although its boundaries are debated, Yorkville is broadly defined as stretching from 79th Street to 96th Street and from Third Avenue to the East River.

It isn’t the largest Hungarian enclave in this country. Cleveland claims that title, with an estimated 70,000 to 100,000 of the nation’s 1.7 million Hungarian-Americans. Other large Hungarian communities thrive in Los Angeles, Sarasota, Fla., and New Brunswick, N.J.

Yorkville, in contrast, had its heyday in the 19th and early 20th centuries, when Hungarian, German, Czech and Slovak populations burgeoned side by side with Irish, Polish and Italian groups. Two breweries provided blue-collar jobs for many, along with a smell recognizable as Yorkville’s for miles.

A stroll through Yorkville’s streets uncovers little of the neighborhood’s former character. There are the worn but elegant facades of the Hungarian Baptist Church and four other Hungarian churches, the scent of paprika-spiced dishes emanating from the Red Tulip and other restaurants, and the dour facade of the 103-year-old Hungarian Literary Society.

But such a glance wouldn’t do justice to the community.

“The numbers, of course, don’t reflect the importance of Yorkville to Hungarians,” said Emese Latkoczy, a director of the Hungarian Human Rights Foundation.

Churches such as Catholic St. Stephen’s weekly draw worshipers from up to 35 to 40 miles away for Hungarian-language services. Hungarians fly hundreds of miles to stock up on salami and other goods in Yorkville shops.

Some even come to learn Hungarian, said Robert Harkay, president of the Hungarian House culture center, where language classes started last year for the increasing numbers paying new attention to their roots.

Travel to and from Hungary also has increased, said Harkay, who one week in July hosted Hungary’s president and two government ministers--on separate visits--at Hungarian House.

Edward Weiss, representing the third generation to sell peppers, sausages and other delicacies from the family’s 2nd Avenue store, also detects a vibrancy that belies the neighborhood’s fading exterior.

Lately, Weiss has seen increasing numbers of young Hungarians arriving to learn English and earn dollars. They cannot stay long because refugee status for Hungarians ended with the demise of Communist rule.

But most don’t want to stay.

“Of course, they want to go back, because it’s freedom there,” said Weiss’ 23-year-old shop clerk, who would identify himself only as Szilard. “(In Hungary), there are opportunities everywhere, but you need money and English.”

Adding to the drain of Hungarians from Yorkville, increasing numbers of retirees are returning to Hungary, where they can live far more comfortably on U.S. pensions, travel agents say.

And even in death, some Hungarians’ wishes to return are being fulfilled.

At the First Reformed Church, on a tree-lined block, the Rev. Bela Poznan is the keeper of the columbarium erected after refugees from the 1956 Hungarian rebellion crushed by the Soviets flooded into Yorkville.

About 10 of the 72 boxes contained the ashes of those who asked to be buried in Hungary when the Communists fell, Poznan said.

He read from one faded typewritten agreement dated June 26, 1958: “The ashes of Imre Vajda will be kept until the widow wants to take the ashes to a free Hungary.”

Poznan said the request might have been influenced by Cardinal Jozsef Mindszenty, a dissident who stipulated before his death in exile in 1975 that he should rest in Hungary once “the star of the faithless Moscow falls.”

Mindszenty has been reinterred there--and so has Imre Vajda.