Ukrainian immigrant, benefactor to Arden Hills Orthodox church, dies at 82

At age 8, Vera Tanasichuk fled with her family from repression in Ukraine. Here in Minnesota, she would go to college, co-own apartment buildings and establish a Ukrainian Orthodox church in Arden Hills.

"She is a testament to anyone who works hard in this country," said her daughter, Kristina. "Perseverance and opportunities in this country saved our family."

Tanasichuk died March 29 at age 82 in St. Paul, where she had lived most of her life.

She was born Vera Zaslavetz in Poltava in 1941, just a few months before Nazi Germany occupied the central Ukraine city. After the war, Soviet Russians persecuted her family, and in 1949 they managed to flee the country, her daughter said.

After a stop in a displaced persons camp in Germany, Tanasichuk, her parents and two sisters landed in Hackensack, Minn. There, her parents worked for a family who owned a mink ranch and a lodge. After a year, the family moved to St. Paul.

She graduated from Harding High School in St. Paul and then from the University of Minnesota with a teaching degree. She taught for a short time and later had her own interior design business.

She and her family attended Saints Volodymyr and Olga Ukrainian Orthodox Church in St. Paul, where many parishioners had also fled persecution in the Soviet Union. At church, she met Murray Tanasichuk, a Ukrainian immigrant by way of Canada.

Murray Tanasichuk died in 1981. With money from her husband's estate and the couple's business investments, Vera in 1988 pledged $1 million to replace Saints Volodymyr and Olga church with a new facility.

Initially, she had planned to fund a fully accessible entrance at the old church, after her aging mother — and other elderly people — struggled with its 60-step entrance. But the church lacked the structural soundness to accommodate the new entrance.

"Mom wanted a place where my grandmother could go to church," Kristina said.

The new church in Arden Hills — St. Katherine Ukrainian Orthodox — was consecrated in 1997. With its five domes, it was built in a 17^th century Ukrainian style.

"I had so much faith we could build a new church," Tanasichuk told the Star Tribune in 1997. "I feared that if we left the Ukrainian language and faith for others [to preserve], the younger generation wouldn't do it."

She was a ballroom dancer on the Chmielewski Funtime Band's television show in the 1980s. "There was a polka girl and there was my mom, who did the waltzes and the tango," Kristina said.

Besides her husband, Tanasichuk is preceded in death by sisters Nina Maeser (Dean) and Valentina Belmont. She is survived by her daughter and her granddaughter, Kalyna White. Services have been held.