OBITUARIES (05/17/98)

OBITUARIES

Bishop Teodor Majkowycz, 66, of Ukrainian Catholic Eparchy of Wroclaw-Gdansk

Press Service of the Patriarchal Curia

LVIV - Bishop Teodor Majkowycz, the first bishop of the Eparchy of Wroclaw-Gdansk, one of the new Ukrainian Catholic eparchies created in Poland, has died of heart illness. The bishop had been struggling with heart difficulties for some time before finally succumbing on Saturday, May 9. He served only two years in office.

Bishop Majkowycz was born on January 6, 1932, in the village of Rzepedz (Repet) in the Ukrainian-Lemko area of present-day Poland. He was ordained to the priesthood on June 24, 1956. He was elected to the episcopacy on the same day that the new eparchy was established, May 24, 1996, and was consecrated bishop on July 12, 1996.

His Eparchy of Wroclaw-Gdansk was created as a suffragan see of the Ukrainian Catholic Metropolia of Peremyshl, Poland, in 1996. Ukrainian Catholics in Poland were estimated at one time to number almost 500,000 faithful. The new eparchies signified what some believe to be a long over-due establishment of the structures needed to accommodate their spiritual needs.

The funeral was scheduled to take place on May 14, with interment to follow in the village where Bishop Majkowycz was born 66 years ago.

Dr. Teodozia Sawyckyj, 80, social worker, community activist

by Anisa Sawyckyj Mycak

RIVERSIDE, Conn. - Teodozia Sawyckyj, Ph.D., a resident of Riverside, Conn., passed away at her home on Saturday, May 9, due to cancer, at the age of 80. She was born on June 1, 1917, to Ukrainian parents, the Rev. Ivan and Maria (Tuna) Klufas in Lezhakhiv near Yaroslav, which was Austria-Hungary then and is Poland now.

She graduated from a private girls' school in Lviv, western Ukraine, in the 1930s. Subsequently she received a law degree from the University of Lviv, but soon thereafter, in the closing years of World War II, she found herself among hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian refugees streaming westward out of Ukraine as the Soviet Communist army advanced to claim western Ukrainian territory in 1944.

Dr. Sawyckyj and her husband, a colleague from law school, and the couple's two small children, lived as displaced persons (so-called DPs) in post-war Germany, where they eked out an existence by setting up a small slipper-making business; she handled the manufacturing side and her husband the marketing.

She arrived in the U.S. in 1949, settling in Utica, N.Y., where she eventually became a social worker for the Oneida County Social Services, specializing in foster care and adoption, a position from which she retired in 1981.

Prior to her career as a social worker, she, like many immigrants before her, tried her hand at a number of jobs, some entrepreneurial in nature. They included steam operator in a laundry, seamstress in a clothing factory and owner of her own hair salon business, which she saw as her only means of staying home to raise her two young children. She was proud of her early years of struggle and felt that these experiences enabled her to better understand human needs in her later years, as she became involved in various humanitarian causes.

Dr. Sawyckyj was a member of the Ukrainian National Women's League of America for nearly half a century, serving in various posts on the local, regional and national levels; she was board member, social services chair, first vice-president, and in 1987 was named "Honorary Member of UNWLA," the organization's highest honor.

As social services chair in the 1970s, she identified a need and developed a far-reaching scholarship program for children of impoverished Ukrainian-Brazilian farm families that brought together donors from around the world and matched them with families in need in Brazil and other countries where Ukrainians have settled. The program, which is still in place today, has produced an entire generation of young professionals, clergy and academics who have enriched their countries of settlement while encouraging an appreciation of their Ukrainian roots.

Satisfying a lively intellectual curiosity, in her mid-40s, Dr. Sawyckyj enrolled in courses in the humanities at Utica College of Syracuse University, and subsequently matriculated at the Ukrainian Free University in Munich, Germany, where she received a Ph.D. in political economy and international law in 1969. She was invited to teach at Utica College in the 1980s, in the college's program of ethnic studies.

By avocation, Dr. Sawyckyj was also an artist who for several years was enrolled at the Munson-Williams-Proctor Institute, working in the media of pottery, ceramics and silver jewelry. She was also skilled in the ancient tradition of making Ukrainian Easter eggs (pysanky), a craft which she passed on to a young generation of Ukrainian American women in Utica, N.Y. She often appeared on local talk shows describing Ukrainian traditions during holiday celebrations. She was also a clothing designer, tailor, milliner and gardener, and could whip up extraordinary Ukrainian multi-layer tortes, but reserved these talents for her family and friends, rather than for commercial purposes.

A skilled writer, she often penned articles for Ukrainian American publications and in the last decade of her life she delved into 100-plus years of her family history, producing a 300-page manuscript in which she chronicled, among other things, her dramatic escape from Ukraine, with an infant son in her arms, through forests full of enemy partisan forces of war-torn Eastern Europe and aerial bombings to safety in the West.

She also collected oral histories from elderly individuals who as youths had participated in the Ukrainian independence movement in the 1920s and 1930s, and she contributed these articles to publications of regional gazetteers.

In the last three years of her life, Dr. Sawyckyj produced and co-edited a book about Ridna Shkola, the Ukrainian girls' school in Lviv funded by the Kokrudz family, from which she had graduated in 1936, and which had been a major force in influencing the direction of her life. Living in a historical period and in circumstances that demanded commitment to social, political or nationalist causes at a very young age, many of the graduates of this school played an important role in the shaping of the political future of Ukraine and its society, whether they stayed behind in Ukraine after World War II, or emigrated to the West. She was committed to seeing this contribution documented in the historical record.

To her gratification, Dr. Sawyckyj survived her diagnosis of cancer long enough to see the book come off the press in Ukraine in December 1997.

Together with her husband, she returned on several visits to a newly independent Ukraine in the 1990s. Since she had taken great pains to instill in her children and grandchildren a knowledge of the language, history and traditions of Ukraine, it was a source of particular satisfaction to her that one of her grandsons, Daniel Sawyckyj, whom she had helped to raise, upon graduating from the University of Pennsylvania went to work for the International Monetary Fund in Ukraine to help rebuild the economy of the land his grandparents has been forced to flee half a century earlier. In a way, her life had come full circle.

Throughout her life, Dr. Sawyckyj regarded her role as a mother to be the source of her greatest pleasure and satisfaction. She was a multi-faceted individual who always regarded life as an endless opportunity to grow, learn, enjoy and most of all, to help others.

She is survived by her husband, Zenon Sawyckyj; her son, Jurij Sawyckyj, M.D., of Riverside, Conn.; her daughter, Anisa Handzia Mycak, and son-in-law, George Mycak of Forest Hills, N.Y.; grandchildren Daniel Sawyckyj of Boston, Christine Hladky of New Jersey and Maksym Savytsky Mycak of Forest Hills, N.Y. Also surviving are her brothers, Emil Klufas, M.D., of Pawtucket, R.I., and Swiatoslaw Klufas, M.D., of Syracuse, N.Y.; her sister, Marta Doberczak of New York City; and their families.

Funeral services were held on May 13 at St. Vladimir's Ukrainian Catholic Cathedral, Stamford, Conn., where Dr. Sawyckyj was a parishioner. Burial was at St. Andrew's Ukrainian Orthodox Cemetery in South Bound Brook, N.J.

In lieu of flowers, donations can be made to The Ukrainian Museum in New York City (memo: Zynovij and Teodozia Sawyckyj Endowment Fund), 203 Second Ave., New York, NY 10003; or to the UNWLA Scholarship Fund (memo: Dr. Teodozia Sawycka Memorial Fund), 171 Main St., P.O. Box 24, Matawan, NJ 07747.