Milena Rudnytska
Milena Rudnytska · Civil Rights & Human Rights
Cheffe du mouvement féministe ukrainien de l'entre-deux-guerres et députée au Sejm polonais : elle porta devant la Société des Nations, en 1933, la question de la famine organisée en Ukraine soviétique
15 juillet 1892, Zboriv (Galicie, Autriche-Hongrie) — 29 mars 1976, Munich
Ukraine, Pologne, Autriche, Allemagne, États-Unis
Milena Rudnytska is recognized among Jewish contributors to Civil Rights & Human Rights — Cheffe du mouvement féministe ukrainien de l'entre-deux-guerres et députée au Sejm polonais : elle porta devant la Société des Nations, en 1933, la question de la famine organisée en Ukraine soviétique
Origins and early life
Milena Rudnytska was born on 15 July 1892 at Zboriv in Austrian Galicia, and her Jewish descent is on her mother's side: Ida Spiegel, born in 1864 into an Orthodox Jewish family of Lviv whose parents kept a small shop on Zamarstynivska Street, converted to Christianity and took the name Olga in order to marry Ivan Rudnytsky in 1888, a marriage delayed about ten years by the fierce opposition of both families, which contemporaries called an absolute mésalliance.
This fiche states plainly that Milena was raised a Greek Catholic in the Ukrainian national tradition, and that the documentation of her mother's origin rests on the historian Illia Chedoluma's monograph on the family and the standard reference works. She took a doctorate in philosophy at Lviv, taught, and from 1928 to 1935 sat as a deputy in the Polish Sejm for the Ukrainian National Democratic Alliance, where she spoke for the Ukrainian minority against the policy of pacification.
Work and career
From 1928 she led the Union of Ukrainian Women, which grew to some hundred thousand members and was the largest women's organization in interwar eastern Europe, and represented it in the international women's movement. Her most consequential act came in 1933: as the Holodomor, the famine in Soviet Ukraine, killed millions behind a closed border, she organized the Ukrainian Public Committee for the Rescue of Ukraine, brought the question before the League of Nations in Geneva, and pressed the international press and the Vatican to speak; the League declined to act, but the record she assembled is now a primary source.
Her brother was one of the leaders of the family's intellectual circle; her son Ivan Lysiak-Rudnytsky became a major Ukrainian historian. Exiled after the war, she lived in Austria, the United States and Germany, and died in Munich on 29 March 1976.
Verify and go deeper with these external references.
Source: Encyclopedia of Ukraine (Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies) ; Ukrainian Jewish Encounter, entretien avec l'historien Illia Chedoluma ; archives de la Société des Nations, Genève
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Cheffe du mouvement féministe ukrainien de l'entre-deux-guerres et députée au Sejm polonais : elle porta devant la Société des Nations, en 1933, la question de la famine organisée en Ukraine soviétique
Source: Encyclopedia of Ukraine (Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies) ; Ukrainian Jewish Encounter, entretien avec l'historien Illia Chedoluma ; archives de la Société des Nations, Genève
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