South Florida Ukrainians, afflicted by the war back home, find solace in this Cooper City church

As the golden domes of St. Nicholas Ukrainian Orthodox Church glistened in the evening sun, South Florida Ukrainians gathered in late March in the Cooper City sanctuary to remember the young victims of the Russian invasion of their homeland.

Women, men and children dressed in yellow and blue, the colors of the Ukrainian flag. Others donned traditional shirts embroidered in flower patterns. Long, thin candles burned in two large silver bowls by the church doors, where the priest and a group of worshippers led the memorial service for the children of Mariupol, the southeastern Ukraine city that has been besieged. Liturgical chants in Ukrainian sliced the air.

In front of the cream-colored church, event organizers and attendees wrote “KIDS” in bands of candlelight. The word was an echo of one painted in white Cyrillic script outside of a Mariupol theater-turned-shelter, a bird’s-eye view call for mercy. But a Russian airstrike flattened the building and killed at least 300 people there last month, Ukrainian officials said.

“The huge letters didn’t stop them,” said memorial service organizer Julia Lemesh, speaking in English and Ukrainian to the mourners.

For decades, the St. Nicholas Ukrainian Orthodox Church has helped South Florida’s Ukrainian migrants remain rooted in their nation’s religious and cultural traditions. Since Russia invaded Ukraine in February, the church has organized remembrance and prayer services, and a workshop for immigration advice. It has also doubled as a relief center, sending basic supplies to Ukraine and raising funds for recently arrived refugees and those still in the war zone.

READ MORE: How one young mother fled Ukraine

Many congregants do not know whether they will see their homeland or their loved ones again. But the St. Nicholas church empowers them through community and faith to navigate the grief and uncertainty of war and occupation, they say.

Lemesh organized the vigil through Florida for Ukraine, a group she co-founded with other Ukrainians after the war began. St. Nicholas was the perfect place to host the memorial service for Mariupol, she told the Miami Herald.

“The church is a center for Ukrainians to come and exchange troubles, fears, news of their relatives,” said Lemesh, a parishioner for nearly a year. “People support each other.”

‘It will not be as joyful’

St. Nicholas Ukrainian Orthodox Church in Cooper City and the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary Ukrainian Catholic Church, off Red Road by Flagler Street in Miami-Dade, principally serve Ukrainian and Ukrainian-American worshippers. They are among the South Florida churches, including Russian Orthodox ones, that have congregants who hail from the Eastern European nation.

READ MORE: Russian Orthodox Church members in Miami have ties to Russia, Ukraine

The Cooper City church’s origins go back to the 1950s when the religious tradition came with migrants escaping Soviet rule, said Iryna Maxfield, the church board president and longtime Floridian who is from the Ukrainian city of Rivne.

Congregants first worshipped in a temporary church, and then in another built in Miami in the late 1960s, according to the church’s website. Two decades later, they bought land in Cooper City, where today’s St. Nicholas was built and blessed to open its doors in 1992. Some 50 worshippers regularly attended services before the war, said Maxfield.

Now, praying parishioners pack the pews for Sunday service.

“Anyone who feels this sorrow or pain or wants to show support is coming,” said Maxfield, who estimated that as many as 100 or more worshippers have come, “It’s sad, the situation that brought them here, but we are happy people are coming together here.”

The iconostasis — the wall of icons that separates the sanctuary from where the congregation sits — is covered in gilded grapes and leaves surrounding countless depictions of Mary, Jesus, and saints. For Lent, a crucifix draped in royal violet stands by the altar, also dressed in purple. Blue bouquets and American and Ukrainian flags speckle the scene.

Reminders of the war have crept into the sanctuary. A “Pray for Ukraine” sign greets visitors by the highway entrance. Wooden doors and bulletin boards used for service schedules and special announcements show calls for donations and solidarity. Taped on the back of pews are Psalm-inspired prayers typed on white paper: Do not let the churches and schools, lands and nations where Your glory resides be destroyed and devastated....

The Rev. Mykhaylo Tsyupka who is from western Ukraine, has led the congregation for nearly three years. He said the parish has been pleading to God for peace in Ukraine since 2014. That year, Russia seized and annexed the Crimean Peninsula, which sits between both nations on the Azov and Black seas, and Russian-backed separatist rebels declared the independence of breakaway states in Eastern Ukraine. The conflict had claimed over 14,000 lives as of December 2021, according to the United Nations.

Since Russia’s full-scale invasion in February, services at St. Nicholas have evolved into laundry lists of prayers: for soldiers both living and fallen, for all Ukrainians, for Kyiv’s government, for everybody.

“Any help people are looking for, the church is trying to provide,” Tsyupka said. “And we are in prayers all the time.”

When Pascha, or Easter, comes later this month — the Orthodox faith celebrates Easter on April 24 — the church will be decorated in white for Christianity’s most important holiday, the resurrection of Christ. Last year, the altar was filled with ivory flowers and worshippers gathered outside the church, colorful Easter baskets at the children’s feet.

“Maybe we will not be as joyful, but we want to devote all the services to pray for victory as soon as possible,” Tsyupka said.

A refectory becomes mission control

The large refectory, the church’s dining room, has yellow arched windows and tables with silver tablecloths and wine-colored chairs. It is usually used for Ukrainian holidays and other celebrations, and for post-service traditional meals cooked in the church kitchen. Since the war, it has been doubling as an operations center where the church coordinates aid for Ukraine.

On the day of the memorial service for Mariupol’s children, women with aprons made varenikis, half-moon potato dumplings. A projector screened Ukrainian broadcast television. The drone of the newscaster announcing airstrikes mingled with the chatter of the cooks and the clanking spoon scooping out filling from a white bowl.

Donations for Ukraine were wrapped in blue plastic and covered with Ukrainian flags and the church’s logo. Each box was labeled in black marker with its contents in English and Ukrainian: Blankets, children’s clothes, toothpaste. Open containers brimmed with disinfectants, medical supplies and body wash. Ready-to-eat meals and bags of pet food leaned against the tower of packages.

St. Nicholas has already shipped 22 aid pallets via truck and plane to Ukraine in recent weeks, and it had sent two previous ones filled with medical supplies for a military hospital in the port city of Odesa. Its volunteers have helped house and feed at least eight recently arrived refugees, including a mother and her three daughters. The church has also raised $63,000 in donations, which have financed the shipping of supplies and the purchase of a small ambulance used by volunteers from a church in Kyiv.

The violence and airstrikes have destroyed roads and devastated cities in the eastern European nation, and the war has cut off some places, like Mariupol, a port city in southern Ukraine that Russia has targeted to establish a route to Crimea. Despite the challenges and steep shipping costs, St. Nicholas has opted to continue collecting and sending relief.

Evgeniy Kucherenko, a 40-year-old volunteer coordinating the donation efforts, is at the church daily to assemble the donation boxes. Sometimes there are three helpers, although on occasions there are as many as 10.

But somebody always shows up, he said.

‘It’s like a film’

At the outdoor vigil for Mariupol, the laughter of playing children interrupted a moment of silence for the deceased children in Ukraine. The blacker the night sky turned, the brighter the word “KIDS” in candlelight burned against the gray pavement.

Oksana Zaskalna stood at the back of the gathering, wearing Ukraine’s flag around her shoulders and a yellow-and-blue crown made of flowers. Her family is still in Kyiv because they cannot evacuate her 85-year-old grandfather, who has undergone several surgeries.

“It’s our home. Why should we leave?” said Zaskalna, 36, a beauty-salon administrator who has lived in Florida for a little over a year.

She said the vigil at St. Nicholas was a chance to gather with other South Florida Ukrainians, who are suspended in the same nightmare as faraway war ravages their home.

“We need to speak out,” she said. “After Mariupol, it can be Kyiv, Odesa, it can be any other city, the children of any other city.”

Some feet away, the youngest child of vigil attendee Anastasiia Sibiriakova rolled around the artificial candles across the pavement. Before fleeing to Miami from Ukraine in late March, Sibiriakova lived in Bucha, a city near Ukraine’s capital, with her husband Serhiy and daughters Alisa, 11, Mila, 9 and Olivia, 4. Forensic investigators have recently begun exhuming bodies from a mass grave in Bucha.

She worked as a photographer, painter and women’s circle coordinator. Her husband had been a professional soccer player. The family had escaped the Russian annexation of Crimea and rebuilt their life in Kyiv’s outskirts, never thinking they would be forced to leave their home twice.

After the war began in February, Sibiriakova quickly packed for the family of five and evacuated to Budapest, the capital of neighboring Hungary. There, they had to wait until a friend could retrieve their visas from their house, she said. Via Warsaw, they flew to South Florida; Olivia was born in Boca Raton. They are staying in the Weston home of a rabbi and his wife that Sibiriakova found through an online website finding housing for Ukrainian refugees.

Every day, she prays for her family back home and for Ukraine. Her brother is a volunteer in Kyiv, getting food, medicine and relief to remaining residents and helping rescue dogs and cats. Her father and grandparents are in a small village near the southern city of Kherson, which fell to Russian soldiers.

“We have a regular life. We have a business, home, school. And now, it’s like [we are living in] a film,” she said, describing how unreal the events of the past weeks sometimes seem.

From the church’s towering entrance, an icon of St. Nicholas, protector and patron saint of children, watched Olivia and other children play with the shimmering white candles. The crowd placed their hands over their hearts and sang Ukraine’s anthem under the bearded saint’s vigilant gaze, a hymn to a homeland at war.

St. Nicholas Ukrainian Orthodox Church

Address: 5031 SW 100th Ave. Cooper City

Telephone: 954-680-2008

Website: http://ukrainianorthodox.church/

Founding date: 1951