Hudson Comes Together For Ukraine, One Pierogi And Benefit Concert At A Time
Based in Hudson, Medical Relief for Ukraine has raised funds to buy ambulances, medical drones, generators, and supplies.
Iryna Johnson and Maryna Bilak, founders of Medical Relief for Ukraine.
When the going gets tough, the tough get cooking. A group of volunteers with strong ties to Ukraine have been doing just that since the very beginning of the Russian invasion, making stuffed dumplings and borscht in the kitchen at St. Michael's Ukrainian Orthodox Church in Hudson. You can taste their wares and help the cause on Saturday, October 7, when they’ll be selling food outside of the Presbyterian Church on 4th and Warren during a concert hosted by the Hudson Festival Orchestra.
How great is this food? In their first month of cooking, the group sent over $8,000 to the National Bank of Ukraine. Since then, they’ve organized as a nonprofit, Medical Relief for Ukraine, focused on the rehabilitation of military and civilians with spinal cord and brain injuries, and helped fund $100,000 worth of ambulances, medical drones, supplies, generators — even prosthetic legs. As part of Next Step Ukraine, they’re helping fund a rehabilitation center in Irpin, near Kyiv, and are opening another one in Lviv.
For co-founder Maryna Bilak, a Hudson artist born and raised in Ukraine, the war could not be any more personal. “My father is over 60; he served his required two years when he was young,” says Bilak, who grew up in the Carpathian Mountains of Western Ukraine. “So he had two years of training, and he was open to the idea that he may need to go pick up a weapon and protect his country, which was very scary.”
As it turned out, no one over 60 would be drafted, but a cousin who grew up next door is serving. “He’s the one who’d never touched a gun in his life, and he has two little girls, one just born. He’s our hero, and we’re deeply grateful, because we saw what was done to Russian-speaking Ukrainians in the East. After the territory was liberated, we found that thousands had been tortured and raped. So what they’d do to the Ukrainian-speaking people in the West, we can too easily imagine. And it’s not just 2022, not just 2014; we have known a long history of Russian oppression and aggression.”
Born in 1984, Bilak remembers the anti-Western propaganda that dominated news coverage in her otherwise lovely childhood. “When the borders opened and lots of Ukrainians started to travel, we realized that everything we had heard from the Kremlin was lies, and we didn’t want that life anymore. We were part of the Soviet Union for 70 years; we’d had enough, and when we saw life in the West, how different it was, we wanted it like that. That’s how we had our revolutions, throwing out a government that was in bed with Russia.”
She’s very much aware that some are questioning the level of U.S. financial support for Ukrainian military efforts; it’s a conversation she’s not afraid to have, and the food, besides raising money, is meant to open up opportunities for conversations of all sorts. “When you look at the math, that money is less than 10% of the larger American foreign aid and defense budget — it’s not as though it would be available for domestic purposes; that’s just not how the federal budget works,” she says. “The help is so very needed and makes a huge difference, and it is not changing American quality of life.”
Peace, she says, is what everyone wants, but it must be peace on Ukraine’s terms. “The people in charge of Russia now, like Putin himself, are all straight out of the KGB. I know some Americans are not happy with the wars that have happened in other places — but even my good friend who is a solid peace advocate recognizes that this war is different. We’re facing a military machine that’s 20 times our size, fighting to protect the values we share and admire from one man’s imperialistic ambitions — and this is not some allegory, it’s millions of living, breathing people’s lives at stake. The US government may not be angelic, but if you’ve experienced an autocratic government up close — as I have, as my Russian friends who’ve had to leave their country have — you realize there is no comparison. The political opposition in Russia, they’re dead or in prison. This is a time for the US to step up and be that big good guy that makes things right, because we are dealing with big evil here..”
Trio Fadolin: violinist Sabina Torosjan, cellist Valeriya Sholokhova, and Ljova on fadolin
The concert being held Saturday, October 7 at 3 p.m. features Trio Fadolin, a string group with Eastern European roots, playing Songs of Refuge, in honor of refugees the world over, throughout history, with particular thoughts of those in Ukraine. They’ll be joined by vocalist Inna Barmash singing in Yiddish and Romanian. The food sale, which will include vareniki (aka pierogies), borscht, holubtsi (Ukrainian stuffed cabbage), and dessert, available frozen or hot and ready to eat, will begin half an hour before the show at 2:30.
