Dr. Maria Fischer-Slysh sponsors Hrushevsky volume

The well-known patron of Ukrainian studies and culture, Dr. Maria Fischer-Slysh, who recently donated one million dollars to the Ukrainian  Catholic University in L’viv, has undertaken to sponsor Volume 9, Book 2, Part 2 of Mykhailo Hrushevsky’s History of Ukraine-Rus. She is dedicating the Volume to the memory of her parents, Dr. Adolf and Olha Slyz.

Dr. Fischer-Slysh was born in Kolomyia in Western Ukraine in 1922 and spent her childhood in the historic city of Belz, before moving with her family to L’viv in 1933. She attended the Ukrainian Academic Gymnasium in L’viv, but after the Soviet occupation of Western Ukraine fled with her family and finished her secondary school in Kholm. She completed her medical studies in Munich in 1949 and immigrated with her family to the United States in 1950. She practiced as a pediatrician in Kankakee, Illinois. In 1959 she married Dr. Rudolf Fischer, who was born in Straubing, Bavaria, and completed his medical studies at the Humboldt University in Berlin. Dr. Fischer passed away in 1982. 

Dr. Fischer-Slysh now resides in Toronto. She is a long-time member of the Board of Directors of the Ukrainian Medical Association of North America (UMANA) in Chicago, head of the Friends of the Academic Gymnasium in the Diaspora, and a member of the board of the Canadian Society of the Friends of Ukraine. She is also a member of the Shevchenko Scientific Society and the League of Ukrainian Philanthropists. A generous donor to numerous scholarly undertakings in Ukraine and Canada, she has made the largest donation in the history of the Ukrainian Catholic University, an institution that is cooperating with CIUS in the new Petro Jacyk Program for the Study of Modern Society and History.

Dr. Fischer-Slysh’s donation of $100,000 to the Hrushevsky Translation Project will make possible the completion of Volume 9, Book 2, Part 2. The volume is the last in Hrushevsky’s account of Bohdan Khmelnytsky’s hetmancy. The volume was translated by Marta Olynyk. Dr. Yaroslav Fedoruk and Dr. Frank Sysyn serve as scholarly editors of the volume, and Myroslav Yurkevich is the managing editor. The volume will be published by CIUS Press in 2010.

Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies