Manor College gets new logo but keeps Ukrainian Catholic heart

Jonathan Peri, the first male and first secular president in Manor College's 70-year history, is guiding the two-year school toward eventual inclusion of four-year bachelor's degrees while he nurtures its deep Ukrainian Catholic roots.

Walking past the Sisters of St. Basil the Great convent, which houses 35 nuns on the 900-student Jenkintown campus, Peri said, "The sisters came to this country from Ukraine in 1911, charged with caring for orphan children in Philadelphia. Up through the 1980s, they were mother and father and breadwinner and caretaker for orphan children."

That same Ukrainian Catholic spirit of compassionate service to others, he said, lives on in the coed college founded by the sisters in 1947, in the St. Basil Academy girls' high school across the street and the on-campus Basilian Spirituality Center where the sisters teach -- even in the barn and adjoining pastures where Manor's veterinary technology students care for the resident horses 24 hours a day.

The bond with Ukraine will be front and center at Friday's annual Founders Day celebration, when students and faculty will donate 70 bags of clothing, diapers, and school supplies to the United Ukrainian American Relief Committee for families in Ukraine. There, the ongoing fighting since Russia announced it would annex Crimea in 2014 has killed a reported 9,700 people and wounded 22,000.

Peri also will unveil Manor's new logo, which includes the trident from Ukraine's coat of arms.

More changes are ahead, according to Peri. The college, which offers 38 two-year associate's degrees in subjects ranging from dental hygiene to business administration, wants to begin conferring four-year degrees as well.

The heart and soul of Manor stays the same, however: its Ukrainian connection, embodied in people like Chrystyna Prokopovych. She is the associate director of the campus Ukrainian Heritage Studies Center, where she treats the collected pysanky (minutely detailed, luminously colorful eggs), beadwork, hand-carved wood, pottery, and leather as if they were her family heirlooms. One of them is.

Standing before a tapestry on the wall, Prokopovych said that her grandfather  Eustachij Pronczak had a small grocery store in Ukraine and was going bankrupt. "A cousin in New York wanted to help him, but knew my grandfather was too proud to accept money," she said. "So he commissioned my grandmother Varvara to make this tapestry. She made it out of potato sacks sewn together and embroidered over with wool threads."

Against a red background, the tapestry features the trident, the Archangel Michael, and a lion that is the symbol of Lviv, the family's home city in western Ukraine.

Years later, the cousin, Stanley Pronczak, sponsored Prokopovych's parents' immigration to America. When he died, his daughter gave the tapestry to Prokopovych. Pronczak, she said, "was an example of one group of immigrants helping the next group coming over here."

Prokopovych, a first-generation American, said that when her parents came to America after World War II, they settled in Northeast Philadelphia so she could attend St. Basil School, which was Ukrainian, in Logan.

The Heritage Studies Center, where she has been curator for 24 years, is her second home, she said: "At my home, I am surrounded by the same kind of things -- embroidery, wood carvings. When you grow up with these things, they stay with you for the rest of your life."

Sister Mary Cecilia Jurasinski, 85, who served for 30 years as Manor College's president until 2015 and now directs the center, agreed.

She pointed to a wooden table, a thank-you gift hand-carved by Maria Chomyn Kuruc, who was widowed during World War II, immigrated to America with her daughter, and was cared for by the Sisters of St. Basil for years.

Nick Rudnytzky, chair of adult and continuing education, is, like Prokopovych, a first-generation Ukrainian American. "Tragedy has brought Ukraine to the forefront of today's headlines. No longer can Putin say, 'We didn't do nothing, nowhere, nohow.' No one is buying the Putin line.

"The Ukrainian people existed for centuries -- divided, partitioned, oppressed," Rudnytzky said. "They will survive this. But we have to hang on to our roots. We have to know the language and the history. It is under attack and can be taken away."

Despite years of bad blood between the Russian and Ukrainian governments, Peri said, Manor has students from both countries who get along fine.

"Human relationships are very different from political ones," Peri said. "Conflicts between politicians are not necessarily representative of what lives in the hearts of the people."