LETTERS TO THE EDITOR (11/24/02)

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

Further explanation regarding the UACF

Dear Editor:

Andrew Nynka's article on the status of Verkhovyna Resort and the UACF board left a few items that could use further explanation. The reason that there are two boards that claim legitimacy can be traced to events surrounding the May 20, 2001, meeting.

At this time we were three weeks from losing Verkhovyna unless we came up with the money. Stephan Kapczak came to the meeting with an agreement from Jeffersonville bank in Monticello to give us a $750,000 mortgage, but we were still short after all costs were covered. He had spoken to various board members about putting in their own personal funds to make up the difference. In addition, the board members would need to sign loan guarantees for the mortgage. He proposed that these individuals, all of whom were present board members, would make up the new board of directors of UACF beginning at the closing on June 7. After a short discussion this proposal was approved unanimously.

Dr. Woroch, who was not present at the meeting due to illness, gave me two votes by proxy (his and his wife Oksana's) and instructed me to vote for the proposal. Dr. Woroch had already taken out a $68,000 emergency loan, using his house in Philadelphia as collateral, to put money into a court-appointed escrow account, so he was the first person to make up the new board.

The controversy exists because members of the board who were unwilling to put up personal funds for the closing attempted to re-establish their membership on the new board by denying that such a vote took place. Denying what happened at this meeting has turned into a he-said/she-said scenario, except for one undeniable fact. Three members of the plaintiffs who are pressing this lawsuit were present at the closing where the exact make-up of the board was listed in the closing documents. Anton Filimonchuk, in fact, signed these documents. In the closing documents he is not listed as a board member because he refused to sign the loan guarantee. It is ironic that he is claiming that a legal document that he signed is in fact illegal. In these documents Mr. Kapczak is listed as President and Dr. Stephan Woroch is listed as CEO. Dr. Woroch remained CEO until, in a letter dated December 12, 2001, he officially stated that because of illness he is passing on all his responsibilities for the running of Verkhovyna resort to Mr. Kapczak.

After Dr. Woroch's death, his family turned to the present board of the UACF to pay off Dr. Woroch's loan which Mr. Kapczak did by taking out a personal loan of his own. To my knowledge Mr. Filimonchuk's board never made any attempt to pay off this loan.

One may question the motivation of the plaintiffs in this suit. What do four 80-year-old individuals hope to accomplish? Since they do not have much chance of winning the court case, their only victory can come from putting pressure on the board by eroding public support. Whatever the outcome of this lawsuit, there will be no winners since the existence of the suit has already hurt the UACF financially by making fund-raising difficult and putting Verkhovyna in a precarious financial situation. Even if Mr. Filimonchuk should win by having the closing declared illegal, he opens the door to David Willner, who had an agreement to buy Verkhovyna from the Ukrainian Fraternal Association, to reclaim his right to buy the resort.

The full story of Verkhovyna is truly tragic and in many ways parallels the story of Ukraine itself; first Verkhovyna is almost sold off to foreigners, then it is pillaged by this group, and finally, because of internal division, it once again is in danger of being lost.

Oleh Kolodiy
Maplewood, N.J.

The letter writer is vice-president of the Ukrainian American Cultural Foundation.

Why apologize for telling the truth?

Dear Editor:

Why should Dr. Myron Kuropas apologize for telling the truth? Alla Lehky Heretz (Letter to the Editor, November 10) admits that the majority of people in present-day Ukraine still live in fear because their tormentors remain in power.

Well, who put those tormentors in power, but the majority of Ukrainian people who still believe in the ideology of communism and who still worship Stalin as a savior and benefactor of the Slavic people?

Far from being a hero, Koba was a closet fascist/socialist who should have been shot for treason (under Section 52 of the Soviet Criminal Code).

Yet no one in the Soviet Union had the courage to charge and arrest him due to that very same "all-encompassing fear" of which Ms. Heretz speaks.

It seems many Ukrainians preferred silent survivorship and complacency within a Communist union, and that very complacency, after decades, translated into complicity with the status quo. Lest she forget, both of independent Ukraine's presidents, Leonid Kravchuk and Leonid Kuchma were high-level Communist apparatchiks and Ukraine's courts have just recently legalized the Communist Party. So what's there to apologize for?

It was Ukrainian NKVD Gen. Pavel Sudoplatov with his Jewish and Ukrainian henchmen who murdered Col. Yevhen Konovalets and others on Stalin's orders.

I, too, wrote to Morley Safer and resented being called "genetically anti-semitic," but what surprised me the most was how our precious American government stood by Mr. Safer's absurd slander. Dr. Kuropas slandered no one; he merely told the Ukrainian diaspora that it cannot profess to have a free independent Ukraine when it is run by the same tyrants that ran it previously.

I agree with Ms. Heretz that many of us suffered in silence and continue to suffer, being deprived by Ukraine of properties nationalized, both under the Soviet and Ukrainian systems.

Finally, many native Ukrainians today still think of us diasporans as traitors and "nationalistic bandits."

Andrew M. Senkowsky, D.D.S.
Van Etten, N.Y.

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