OBITUARY: Walter Y. Sochan, UNA executive officer and community leader (06/03/01)

OBITUARY: Walter Y. Sochan, UNA executive officer and community leader

PARSIPPANY, N.J. - Walter Y. Sochan, former supreme secretary of the Ukrainian National Association, who served the organization as an executive officer for 28 years, died on May 23. He was 77.

He died in St. Michael's Hospital in Newark, where he was hospitalized since suffering a heart attack 10 days earlier.

Mr. Sochan was a civic and community activist who was involved in Ukrainian community life from the local to the international levels, the American fraternal movement and local Jersey City affairs.

Born on November 7, 1923, in Khodoriv, Ukraine, he emigrated to the United States in 1949 and became a U.S. citizen in 1954.

Mr. Sochan completed the Ridna Shkola elementary school in Khodoriv, then attended the Ukrainian Academic Gymnasium in Lviv and graduated from secondary school in Khodoriv. World War II interrupted his subsequent studies at the Lviv Polytechnic Institute, where he was majoring in mechanical engineering. A youth member of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, along with his parents and two brothers he became a political refugee from the advancing Soviet Red Army. The Sochans fled in July 1944 to Austria, where the patriarch of the family, Antin, was killed in December 1944 during U.S. bombing of Tulln.

The family was later relocated to a Displaced Persons camp in Landshut, Bavaria. While in Germany, Mr. Sochan studied political economy and journalism in Regensburg.

Mr. Sochan arrived in the United States in March 1949 with his mother, Olha (née Lewycky), and brother Ihor. Older brother Oleh, then studying medicine in Munich, arrived several years later. The family settled in Jersey City, where Mr. Sochan found employment with the Ukrainian National Association, then headquartered there.

At the UNA Home Office he met Neonila Merena, an employee of the Svoboda Press administration. The two married in November 1952.

Mr. Sochan took life insurance and computer courses, and worked his way up from an employee of the Recording Department to assistant to the department chief. He introduced the first IBM keypunch, sorting and tabulating machines to the UNA Home Office in 1952, and later, in 1984-1985, was responsible for introducing the UNA's first IBM 036 computer system. As well he prepared new life insurance ratebooks for the UNA.

In 1966 Mr. Sochan was elected an executive officer of the UNA, first serving as vice-president and recording secretary and later as supreme secretary. During that period he was responsible for introducing new classes of insurance and annuities.

He retired in 1994, and was elected an honorary member of the UNA's General Assembly in recognition of his 45 years of service to the fraternal society - 28 of them as an officer on the UNA Executive Committee.

He was involved also in the work of the local UNA district, today known as the Northern New Jersey District Committee, as well as UNA Branch 287, Sons of Ukraine.

Mr. Sochan was active in the New York and New Jersey Fraternal Congresses, serving as president of the New Jersey body in 1974-1975, and was the UNA's delegate to the National Fraternal Congress of America.

He was a member of the Secretariat of the Ukrainian World Congress and was a member of the initiative group that laid the groundwork for the international organization's establishment in 1967. Mr. Sochan was a delegate at the first two World Forums of Ukrainians held in Kyiv in 1992 and 1997.

Mr. Sochan also served as vice-president of the National Council of the Ukrainian American Coordinating Council; was a member of the board of directors of the Coordinating Committee to Aid Ukraine, of which he was a founder; and was vice-president of the Selfreliance Association of Ukrainian Americans. He was a co-worker and supporter of the forthcoming Encyclopedia of the Ukrainian Diaspora. In the past he had represented the UNA in the Ukrainian Congress Committee of America, and served on its by-laws and nominations committees.

On the local level he served on the Jersey City Board of Adjustment in the 1970s and was active with the Ukrainian National Home. He was president of the Ukrainian Republican Club of New Jersey, and was repeatedly recognized for his contributions by the Republican National Committee.

He was involved also in journalism. He was a correspondent for the U.S. Information Agency's Voice of America in the 1960s-1970s, interviewing diverse personages and filing many reports on Ukrainian institutions in North America; served as sports editor of the Svoboda Ukrainian-language daily newspaper for 25 years; and was a member of the Ukrainian Journalists Association of America.

An active athlete during his youth in Ukraine, in the United States Mr. Sochan was a member of the Ukrainian Sports Club (USC) and Sitch soccer teams, as well of the USC and the Plai Sports Club volleyball teams. He was a founding member of the Ukrainian Sports Association of the U.S.A. and Canada, in which he served on the executive board.

In 1998 Mr. Sochan received the Ukrainian President's Award for Merit medal presented in Washington by Ukraine's Ambassador to the United States, Dr. Yuri Shcherbak, in recognition of his many years of "personal contribution in promoting Ukrainian-U.S. cooperation and his activities in Ukrainian American institutions."

Reporting on that distinction, the Kyiv-based newspaper Literaturna Ukraina quoted from a letter Mr. Sochan had written to a colleague in Ukraine: "We are far from Ukraine, beyond the oceans, but in our hearts and through our emotions we are always with her. We use all means possible - financial, political and cultural - to try to help Ukraine."

Surviving are Mr. Sochan's wife, Neonila; son, Taras; daughter, Romana Olha Hadzewycz, with her husband, Andrew, and their children, Markian and Paul; and two brothers, Oleh and Ihor, with their spouses; as well as six nieces and nephews with their spouses.

Requiem services were offered on May 24-25 at the McLaughlin Funeral Home in Jersey City. The funeral liturgy was offered on May 26 at Ss. Peter and Paul Ukrainian Catholic Church in Jersey City, N.J., and burial followed at Holy Cross Cemetery in North Arlington, N.J.

The family has requested that memorial donations be made to St. John the Baptist Ukrainian Catholic School, 746 Sanford Ave., Newark, N.J. 07106.

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