Author: Oksana Zakydalsky

TORONTO – Last year, Marta Iwanek won the Tom Hanson Photojournalism Award, presented by the Canadian Journalism Foundation (CJF) and The Canadian Press. On Saturday, April 24, she was the recipient of more photography awards. One was a prize for the best portrait – a photo of a Kenyan girl, Mumtaz Ibrahim, who was born...

TORONTO – Ariadna Ochrymovych, an independent film producer/director/writer and educator based in Toronto, has made several documentary films, the latest of which is “Holodomor: Voices of Survivors.” She interviewed over 100 Holodomor survivors across Canada – in every major city. The film was made under the auspices and with the cooperation of the Ukrainian Canadian...

TORONTO – Artist Sophia Lada, known for her artwork rooted in folklore and mythology, died in Toronto on February 14 after a three-year battle with cancer. She was born in Krakow, Poland, in 1941 and, after her family’s obligatory stay in a refugee camp in Germany (in Augsburg and Regensburg), they immigrated to Philadelphia in...

TORONTO – The 2015 Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), which runs from September 10 to 20 and features 289 films from 79 countries, again includes a film about the Maidan  – “Winter on Fire: Ukraine’s Fight for Freedom” by Evgeny Afineevsky. Born in Kazan, Russia, in 1972, Afineevsky had a full film making career in...

TORONTO – The Ukrainian Canadian Research and Documentation Center (UCRDC), which is involved in research on victims of the Holodomor and on the events of World War II in Ukraine, recently launched a new oral history project: interviews with the children of Holodomor survivors – persons who did not themselves live through the famine but...

TORONTO – The Jewish presence in Ukraine dates back 2,000 years. A traveling exhibit highlighting and exploring the relationship between the two communities – “A Journey Through the Ukrainian-Jewish Encounter from Antiquity to 1914” – was recently mounted by the Ukrainian-Jewish Encounter (UJE), which since 2008 has been studying and supporting this encounter. The exhibit...

TORONTO – Marta Iwanek is this year’s winner of the Tom Hanson Photojournalism Award presented by the Canadian Journalism Foundation (CJF) and The Canadian Press. A graduate of the journalism program at Ryerson University in Toronto in 2012, and of the photojournalism program at Loyalist College (Belleville) in 2014, Ms. Iwanek accepted the Hanson award...

TORONTO – The one opinion of Serhii Plokhy’s new book “The Last Empire: the Final Days of the Soviet Union” with which all reviewers agree is that, as Anne Applebaum wrote, it’s “an indispensable guide to the tensions and rivalries of the present.” It has been hailed as an “extraordinarily well timed book” (Slate magazine)...

TORONTO – On March 3-7, the vice-president of the World Jewish Congress and chairman of the Confederation and Communities in Ukraine, Josef Zissels, spoke to both Ukrainian- and Russian-speaking communities in Toronto and Ottawa. During the Soviet period, he was active in the dissident movement, serving six years in penal colonies. In 1988 he set...

TORONTO – The demonstrations on the Maidan in Kyiv that subsequently became known as the Euro-Maidan and the Revolution of Dignity began on November 21, 2013, when it became known that the Yanukovych government had refused to sign an Association Agreement with the European Union. An avalanche of propaganda was let loose against the Maidan...

TORONTO – Former Hamilton Spectator photographer Leon Hloba, 88, died in Dundas, Ontario, back on December 31, 2012. When his surviving sister Zhenia Maslany opened his safety deposit box, she found documents that confirmed some of the stories about her brother during World War II. He had not talked about that time, but the documents...