Turning the pages back... October 6, 1933 (09/30/01)

Turning the pages back...

October 6, 1933

On October 6 The Ukrainian Weekly will celebrate its 68th birthday. Following are excerpts of an article from the 60th anniversary review compiled by The Ukrainian Weekly staff in 1993 and reprinted in the UNA's 1994 Almanac.

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On October 6, 1933, the first issue of The Ukrainian Weekly ... rolled off the presses at the Svoboda print shop as a supplement to the 40-year-old Ukrainian-language daily newspaper Svoboda.

The lead editorial noted that the four-page English-language tabloid was not the first venture of its kind sponsored by the Ukrainian National Association, then, as now, the largest Ukrainian fraternal organization. For it was the UNA that during the previous seven years had published The Ukrainian Juvenile Magazine; in addition, it had on occasion published English-language sections in Svoboda. And therein were the clues to the reason The Ukrainian Weekly was initiated.

Since the mid-1920s, the UNA leadership was becoming increasingly concerned with the younger generation: how to maintain its interest in the Ukrainian American community and how to prevent this generation from becoming completely assimilated into the American milieu.

Then came the influence of current events in the 1930s: the Polish pacification campaign directed at Ukrainians living under its rule and the brutal work of Joseph Stalin in Ukraine, the man-made famine. Svoboda published articles about both on its pages, but it wanted to tell the truth about the sufferings of Ukrainians to the general public. Thus, it began publishing selected articles in the English language, which would be accessible to fellow Americans. Finally, the UNA convention in 1933 voted to begin publishing an English-language weekly.

And thus The Weekly was born with a dual mission: to keep Ukrainian American youth involved in the Ukrainian community and to tell the world the truth about Ukraine.

Source: "The Thirties: A neophyte newspaper and the Great Famine" by Roma Hadzewycz in "The Ukrainian Weekly: A 60th Anniversary Review," special section of the 1994 Almanac of the Ukrainian National Association, Jersey City, N.J.: Svoboda Press, 1994.

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