Turning the pages back... May 15, 1983 (05/07/00)

Turning the pages back...

May 15, 1983

Among the commemorations in 1983 of the 50th anniversary of the Great Famine of 1932-1933 in Ukraine was a special commemoration during "Providna Nedilia." Following is an excerpt from The Ukrainian Weekly's report of the event.

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SOUTH BOUND BROOK, N.J. - Nearly 13,000 persons, according to police estimates, gathered here at the Ukrainian Orthodox Center of St. Andrew the First-Called Apostle on May 15, St. Thomas Sunday according to the Julian calendar, to pay their respects and mourn the 7 million men, women and children, who died 50 years ago in the Great Famine of 1932-33 - Stalin's planned genocide of the Ukrainian nation. St. Thomas Sunday, known as "Providna Nedilia" (Seeing-Off Sunday) to Ukrainians, is traditionally set aside as a day to honor the dead.

The memorial services ... this year specially dedicated to the famine victims, began with a 9 a.m. archpastoral divine liturgy celebrated by Metropolitan Mstyslav of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church with the assistance of Archbishop Mark of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church and Bishop Iziaslav of the Byelorussian Autocephalous Orthodox Church. ... Following the liturgy, thousands congregated before the steps of St. Andrew's Memorial Church for the outdoor ecumenical requiem service that was conducted by clergy of the Ukrainian Orthodox, Catholic and Protestant faiths.

Metropolitan Mstyslav ... delivered the sermon. He said: "This year's Pascha in the life of the Ukrainian nation and the faithful of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church is marked with the inexpressible painful remembrance of that which occurred only 50 years ago. In 1932 and 1933, Moscow, crimson with the human blood which it shed through the ages and totally brutal in its treatment of the nations which it enslaved, ... resolved to erase from the face of the earth the Ukrainian nation as a separate, independent nation-state ... , confiscated by force from the Ukrainian farmer his ancestral land, a land made holy by his bitter sweat, a land which through the ages was the strongest fortress of the Ukrainian nation and, at the end of the year 1932, robbed from him everything which the generous Ukrainian earth had borne him during that very abundant year of harvest. ... As a consequence of this ... during the Easter of 1933 black banners already flew over Ukrainian villages, announcing that the 'village had died out.' In the torments of death by starvation, that winter almost 7 million Ukrainians perished."

Source: "13,000 attend Great Famine memorial service" by Roma Sochan Hadzewycz, The Ukrainian Weekly, May 22, 1983, No. 21, Vol. LI.

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