PHILADELPHIA – It was back on September 9, 1933, that a small group of immigrants gathered on 13th Street in New York City with the goal of providing material and moral support to their homeland: Lemkivshchyna, or the Lemko region, a Ukrainian ethnographic area in southeastern Poland. They elected a committee, began activities such as creating traveling libraries in the Lemko region to promote education and, three years later, held their first national congress in Philadelphia, officially forming the Organization for the Defense of Lemkivshchyna in America (Orhanizatsiya Oborony Lemkivshchyny, or OOL).