Orthodox Ukrainians are celebrating their first Christmas since Russia invaded last year.
Reverend John Haluszczak has been leading St. Vladimir’s Ukrainian Orthodox Church on Pittsburgh’s Southside for 30 years.
Haluszczak, now 70, remembers Orthodox Christmas Eve as a child in Carnegie. The kids would at the window for the first star to come out before they could eat. But because it was so cloudy in Pittsburgh, some kids would get impatient and shine a flashlight.
On Friday, Jan. 6, Orthodox Christmas Eve, he says the church will be focused on fasting. There will be 12 traditional dishes, such as borscht, pierogies and rolled cabbage, with no meat or dairy. When he arrived in 1993, many of the original members of the congregation had been in Ukraine during famines initiated by the Russian leader Joseph Stalin. Some of those members, he said, didn’t like to fast as much during the holidays because it reminded them of hard times in their life.
After the meal, there is a church service, where members sing traditional songs. In years past, Haluszczak said, they would go door-to-door afterward singing carols, which would continue for 40 days.
“In every house, you got some kielbasa, though,” he said. “You got to taste everyone and how this lady made ham and all the cookies that were there. So we looked forward to that all the time.”
When he was a kid, he said, most Pittsburghers didn’t understand what it meant to be Ukrainian and would often call him Russian. “That was considered basically using a swear word to call someone a Russian,” he said. “If you'd done that to my grandfather, he probably would have picked you up and thrown you in the river.”
Haluszczak visited Ukraine after the illegal annexation of Crimea in 2014, and he said that Russian President Vladimir Putin’s aggression has actually made more Ukrainians move away from the Russian Orthodox Church and join a Ukrainian Orthodox parish.
This year the parish has been making donations and taking collections for Ukraine. And Haluszczak has been saying a special prayer for Ukraine every Sunday.
“It doesn't pray that we kill the opposition,” he said. “It's about that God will eliminate the desire of the aggressor to harm us. We're asking God to stop that. Stop the violence, basically, not to win.”
