Lysiuk, Kalenyk

Lysiuk, Kalenyk also Lissiuk [Лисюк, Каленик; Lysjuk; real name: Лепикач, Василь; Lepykash, Vasyl], b 18 August 1889 in Bubnivka, Haisyn county, Podilia gubernia, d 12 August 1980 in Chicago, Illinois, USA. Revolutionary, civic leader, and philanthropist. In 1909 he was sentenced by the tsarist authorities to 20 years’ imprisonment for participating in an assassination plot, but he escaped within eighteen months. During the First World War he served in the Russian army, and during the period of Ukraine’s struggle for independence (1917–20), in the Army of the Ukrainian National Republic. After emigrating to the United States of America in 1923, he sold rare postage stamps and later set up a manufacturing and an investment firm. He donated some of his expanding profits to Ukrainian cultural and charitable institutions, such as the Ukrainian Scientific Institute in Berlin, the Ukrainian Husbandry Academy in Poděbrady, the Ukrainian Invalids’ Aid Society in Lviv, and the Museum of Ukraine's Struggle for Independence in Prague. In 1954 he founded the Ukrainian National Museum in Ontario, California; he served as its president until it was merged four years later with the Ukrainian National Museum (Chicago). In 1958 he set up the Ukrainian-American Foundation. He published the bilingual journal Our News (1940) and the museum quarterly Na slidakh (1955–6), compiled three stamp catalogues, and wrote several political pamphlets.

[This article originally appeared in the Encyclopedia of Ukraine, vol. 3 (1993).]