1994: THE YEAR IN REVIEW: The noteworthy: events and people (12/25/94)

1994: THE YEAR IN REVIEW

The noteworthy: events and people

This section encompasses all those noteworthy events and people that simply defy classification under any of our other headings for this year-end review. So here goes:

At the beginning of the year, on January 10, Weekly readers learned that New Jersey's Holocaust-genocide studies bill, stripped of its Ukrainian and Polish amendments (regarding the Great Famine and the Polish Christian victims of the Nazis), had failed to reach the floor in the final session of the New Jersey state legislature. Observers said there were two reasons for the failure: first, the bill was poorly written to begin with; second, there was an outpouring of concern that the bill, as proposed by Assembly Speaker Garabed "Chuck" Haytaian, was exclusionary and biased. The latter prompted Sens. Ronald Rice and Randy Corman to introduce amendments in the State Senate recognizing, respectively, the Ukrainian and Polish tragedies. These were removed, however, when the State Assembly re-amended the measure.

In March, during its new session, the state legislature passed another bill mandating the teaching of the Holocaust and other genocides in New Jersey elementary and secondary schools. The difference was that the second bill left open the possibility of studying all genocides, thus spurring Walter Bodnar of Americans for Human Rights in Ukraine to write that the curriculum bill is "an opportunity to be used."
On February 26, after almost a year of discussions, eight Ukrainian American business and professionals societies launched a national federation. The charter members of the Federation of Ukrainian American Business and Professional Associations met on February 26 to set up an organizational framework.

They elected an executive committee chaired by Lydia Chopivsky Benson of Washington and a committee of national directors that includes representatives of each of the eight groups: The Buffalo Group, Ukrainian Business and Professional Group of Chicago, Ukrainian Graduates of Detroit and Windsor, Ukrainian American Professionals and Business Persons Association of New York and New Jersey, Ukrainian Professionals Society of Philadelphia, Ukrainian Technological Society of Pittsburgh, Ukrainian American Business and Professionals Association of Rochester and The Washington Group. Together these associations represent more than 1,000 persons involved in diverse businesses and professions.
A film which elicited reaction on the part of Ukrainian viewers in Canada and the U.S. was the television series "Blood and Belonging" by Michael Ignatieff. A production of BBC Wales and Primedia Canada, it premiered at the beginning of February on TV Ontario and on PBS in the United States in March. Ukraine formed the first episode in the six-part series, with the focus on how the Russians are faring in Ukraine after independence.

The film, based on Mr. Ignatieff's 1993 book "Blood and Belonging: Journey into the New Nationalism," was provocative and outraging for a Ukrainian audience in that the author's investigation falls victim to his avowed Russo-centrism, an attitude which can best be described as Great Russian condescension towards "those little Russians," which in Mr. Ignatieff's case, originates in the author's paternal roots in old tsarist Russia. In Toronto, the showing of the film was followed by a phone-in discussion, with Prof. Orest Subtelny of York University taking the calls after the episode on Ukraine.
After years of functioning under the Soviet regime, practically as the arm of the KGB when it came to "diagnosing" dissidents, psychiatrists in Ukraine held the first national meeting of the Ukrainian Psychiatric Association. The Western co-sponsor of the educational conference, held May 5-7 at the Pavlov Psychiatric Institute, was the Psychiatric Committee (chaired by Dr. Jurij Savyckyj) of the Ukrainian Medical Association of North America.

One of the main organizers on the Ukrainian side was a prominent psychiatrist and himself a dissident, Dr. Semyon Gluzman, who spent 10 years in prison for his protests against Soviet abuse of psychiatry and in the 1980s founded an unofficial psychiatric association called the Union of Independent Ukrainian Psychiatrists.
The Short Hills, N.J.-based Children of Chornobyl Relief Fund organized its 11th airlift to aid the victims of the 1986 nuclear disaster in Ukraine. What made this airlift different from all others was that the U.S. government provided a C-5 Galaxy military cargo plane to transport the $3.5 million worth of medical equipment and supplies, most notably a huge $1.1 million magnetic resonance imaging system (MRI), whose procurement was made possible through the joint efforts of the Ukrainian National Women's League of America and the CCRF.

The airlift was supported by the Congressional Wives Task Force formed after a fact-finding mission to Ukraine during the summer of 1993. Use of the C-5 was approved by the Department of Defense. The airlift took off from Dover Air Force Base in Delaware, where the mobile MRI, housed in a trailer, was carefully loaded onto the cargo plane. The MRI was bound for Kyyiv, while other precious cargo was destined for 12 medical facilities in cities throughout Ukraine, including Kyyiv, Luhanske, Chernihiv, Lviv, Kharkiv, Donetske and Cherkasy.
Olga Medynsky, 72, a native of the village of Savaryn, near Brody, Ukraine, and today a resident of Wethersfield, Conn., was recognized on July 18 at the Consulate of Israel by Yad Vashem, the official Holocaust remembrance agency, as one of the "Righteous Among the Nations." She was cited for her role in helping Jews escape Nazi persecution in German-occupied Ukraine, among them a 14-year-old girl named Dziunia. Mrs. Medynsky received the medal of the Righteous and her name will be inscribed on the Honorable Wall in the Garden of the Righteous at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem.
Billionaire philanthropist George Soros accepted the Ukrainian Institute of America Achievement Award at a November 6 luncheon at the Plaza Hotel in New York. Mr. Soros has donated millions of dollars toward the establishment of Western-style democratic and economic institutions in Ukraine through his Soros Foundation, or more specifically its Ukrainian arm, the International Renaissance Foundation of Ukraine.

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