Turning the pages back...

May 15, 1983

Nearly 13,000 people gathered at the Ukrainian Orthodox Center of St. Andrew the First-Called Apostle in South Bound Brook, N.J., on May 15, 1983, "Providna Nedilia," to pay their respects and mourn the 10 million who died in the genocidal Great Famine of 1932-1333. The services began with an archpastoral divine liturgy celebrated by Metropolitan Mstyslav of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church with Archbishop Mark of the UOC and Bishop Iziaslav of the Byelorussian Autocephalous Orthodox Church. Afterwards, thousands congregated before the steps of St. Andrew's Memorial Church for the ecumenical requiem service conducted by clergy of the Ukrainian Orthodox, Catholic and Protestant faiths, inclduing Metropolitan Stephen Sulyk of the Ukrainian Catholic Church and Pastor Wladimir Borowsky of the Ukrainian Evangelical Alliance of North America.

Metropolitan Mstyslav stated: "This year's Pascha in the life of the Ukrainian nation and the faithful of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church is marked with the inexpressible painful remembrance of that which occurred only 50 years ago. In 1932 and 1933, Moscow, crimson with the human blood which it shed through the ages and totally brutal in its treatment of the nations which it enslaved, guided only by designs of plunder, resolved to erase from the face of the earth the Ukrainian nation as a separate, independent nation-state. Guided by this goal, Moscow confiscated by force from the Ukrainian farmer his ancestral land, a land made holy by his bitter sweat, a land which through the ages was the strongest fortress of the Ukrainian nation and, at the end of the year 1932, robbed from him everything which the generous Ukrainian earth had borne him during that very abundant year of harvest."

The chairman of the National Committee to Commemorate Genocide Victims in Ukraine, Prof. Petro Stercho, spoke: "We have a sacred duty to remember and to make others aware of the past and present sacrifice of the Ukrainian nation in the battle for freedom, truth and justice. ... We have a sacred duty to make our Ukrainian youth and the nations of the free world aware of these tragic historic facts."

Source: "13,000 attend Great Famine memorial service," by Roma Sochan Hadzewycz, The Ukrainian Weekly, May 22, 1983, Vol. LI, No. 21.

Copyright © The Ukrainian Weekly, May 11, 2003, No. 19, Vol. LXXI

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