Böske Simon (1909—1970) was a

Jewish Hungarian The history of the Jews in Hungary dates back to at least the Kingdom of Hungary, with some records even predating the Hungarian conquest of the Carpathian Basin in 895 CE by over 600 years. Written sources prove that Jewish communities lived i ...

beauty queen A beauty pageant is a competition that has traditionally focused on judging and ranking the physical attributes of the contestants. Pageants have now evolved to include inner beauty, with criteria covering judging of personality, intelligence, ...

, the first winner of the title

Miss Hungary Miss Hungary is a national Beauty pageant in Hungary first held in 1929. History * 1929 - World War II The first pageant was held in 1929 and the winner of it won the Miss Europe title. In 1936 Zsa Zsa Gabor won the title, but she was underaged ...

(1929) and the winner of the Miss Europe 1929 pageant, held in Paris. After her victory in Paris she was received in private audience by the French President, fêted in Vienna on her return journey to Hungary, and greeted at the railway station in Budapest by a crowd of thousands.Mark Traa, ''De mooiste van het land'' (Amsterdam, 2015), unpaginated electronic edition
On Google Books
/ref> She was soon, however, subjected to antisemitic attacks and political pressure.Louise O. Vasvári
Böske Simon, Miss Hungaria and Miss Europa (1929): Beauty Pageants and Packaging Gender, Race, and National Identity in Interwar Hungary
''Hungarian Cultural Studies'', 12 (2019), pp. 193-238. On 22 December 1929 she married the textile business heir Pál Brammer, but the couple divorced in 1935. She then married Dániel Jób, artistic director of the

Comedy Theatre of Budapest The Comedy Theater of Budapest ( hu, Vígszínház) is a theater in Budapest. Starting in the turn of the 19th and 20th century as an opposition to the conservative National Theater, it became a pioneer institution of Hungarian drama, and one of ...

. The couple survived the Second World War in hiding but lived in poverty for the remainder of their lives.

References

1909 births 1970 deaths Miss Europe winners Hungarian beauty pageant winners {{Europe-pageant-bio-stub