George Washington University announces Ukrainian endowment (06/23/96)

George Washington University announces Ukrainian endowment

WASHINGTON - The George Washington University recently received a generous donation of stock, valued at $400,000, from William Petrach of Arlington, Va. Mr. Petrach's gift will be used to establish the William and Helen Petrach Endowment for Ukrainian Exchanges and Programs.

The Ukrainian exchange program will be administered by the Institute for European, Russian and Eurasian Studies at GWU.

The William and Helen Petrach Endowment for Ukrainian Exchanges and Programs will support exchanges of faculty and graduate students between The George Washington University and Lviv State University. The exchange will support visiting professorships, and other closely related activities designed to facilitate scholarly and cultural exchanges between Ukraine and the United States. The focus will be on training and upgrading scholarship in Ukraine and on generating first-rate scholarship, teaching and policy analysis at The George Washington University.

The exchange program will be interdisciplinary in nature. Professors and students in such disciplines as economics, international affairs, political science, history, languages and literature, geography, law, anthropology and other fields would be eligible for consideration to participate in the exchange. It is anticipated that, beginning in 1997, the endowment would fund the cost of one Ukrainian scholar or graduate student and one GWU faculty member or student to travel to the host country for two months.

Changes in the field

Since the break-up of the Soviet Union, the field once known as Soviet studies has necessarily undergone great changes. The Russian and East European Studies (REES) program at GWU has responded by choosing to add a focus on one of the newly independent states.

Ukraine was chosen due to strong faculty and student interest, and because it is probably the most important newly independent state in the region. The availability of Ukrainian experts in the Washington area to serve as adjunct instructors enables the university to offer graduate-level courses on the politics, economics and history of Ukraine.

Dr. Oleh Hawrylyshyn, an economist at the World Bank and former professor of economics at GWU, teaches economics of Ukraine; Dr. Volodymyr Zviglyanich, who is also a research associate at the Institute for European, Russian and Eurasian Studies, teaches Ukrainian politics and government; and Dr. Martha Bohachevsky-Chomiak of the National Endowment for the Humanities offers a course on the history of Ukraine.

REES faculty also have research interests that extend to Ukraine. For example, Prof. Sharon Wolchik and Dr. Zviglyanich are currently editing and co-authoring a book titled "Ukraine: The Search for a National Identity," with contributions from both U.S. and Ukrainian specialists. The university has hosted various lectures and seminars on Ukrainian issues, including an address by Dr. Yuri Shcherbak, ambassador of Ukraine, on "Ukraine and Contemporary Geopolitics." Ambassador Shcherbak also delivered the keynote address and participated in a public seminar (organized by Prof. Wolchik) in November 1995 that was well attended by prominent Washington policy-makers.

Benefactor's biography

Mr. Petrach was born in the town of Dobrotvir under Polish administration, and as a young man took officer training in the Polish army. At the top of his cadet class, he was awarded tuition at Lviv University, where he received a degree in Slavic languages in 1939. He then went to war in the Polish army against the German invasion, was captured and put in a German prison camp.

He escaped from the Germans and, upon attempting to return home to Lviv, was arrested by Soviet border guards who had annexed the former Polish territory. He was again able to escape imprisonment and returned to Lviv, where he obtained a master's degree in library sciences from the university.

Mr. Petrach served in the Soviet Army at the beginning of World War II, but was falsely accused of treason and sent to labor camps at Stalingrad and Northern Island. He was released from the camps in 1944, when Soviet losses necessitated a review of former military personnel, and placed in command of a penal battalion. After being captured and sent to a German prison camp, he and 120 other prisoners escaped to Czecho-Slovakia and formed a joint partisan battalion in Nachod.

After the end of the war, Mr. Petrach became a professor of Russian language and literature at Broumov College in Czecho-Slovakia. He emigrated to Canada in 1948, and in 1952 moved to New York, where he met his future wife, Helen Vasilevsky.

In 1964 he took a position as an instructor of advanced Slavic languages for the National Security Agency at Fort Meade, Md., and after one year became a linguist/research analyst for the U.S. Army. He retired after 29 years of service and was awarded a medal for "dedicated and outstanding service to the government of the United States."

Mrs. Petrach served as a librarian at the New York Academy of Medicine and, after retiring, moved to Washington, where she was active in volunteer work with youth, especially cultural and religious education at the Fort Myers military base. After several years of "retirement," she accepted a position as a financial analyst at the Federal Reserve in Washington, which she held for nine years. She died on June 26, 1984.

The Petrach Endowment Fund can be seen as Mrs. Petrach's legacy because her interest in the stock market led to the purchase and increased valuation of the stocks her husband has donated to The George Washington University.

Those interested in contributing to the William and Helen Petrach Endowment for Ukrainian Exchanges and Programs are encouraged to send their donations to the following address: The William and Helen Petrach Endowment, Institute for European, Russian and Eurasian Studies, 2130 H St. NW, Suite 601, Washington, DC 200052; (202) 994-6340; fax, (202) 994-5436.

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