Dr. Orest Popovych

Dr. Orest Popovych, 90 of Howell, NJ, entered into eternal life on Tuesday, March 14, 2023 at his home.

He is preceded in death by his parents, Olha and Bohdan Popovych.

Born in Lviv, Ukraine on January 18, 1933, he immigrated to the US in 1949 and settled in Newark, New Jersey. After finishing Barringer High School in Newark in 1951, Orest enrolled in the fall of that year at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ, majoring in chemistry. In the fall of 1955, Orest entered the PH.D. Program in Chemistry at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.I.T.) in Cambridge, Mass., first as a teaching assistant and then as an Allied Chemical and Dye Fellow. In January 1959, he was awarded his Doctorate of Philosophy (Ph.D.) degree in analytical chemistry which he finished with distinction. He first embarked on a corporate career with ESSO (Exxon/Mobil) and in 1963 he began teaching in Brooklyn College of the City University of New York where he became a full professor in the Department of Chemistry.

Throughout his student and professional years as well as after retirement, Orest pursued a parallel career as a tournament chess player, and later also as a chess organizer and author. In 1957, he was elevated by the U.S. Chess Federation to the rank of Master, in 1972, to the rank of Senior Master and in 1974 to that of Life Master. Since 1976, he has played in international chess tournaments, mostly in the USA, England and Norway, but also twice in Germany and once in Switzerland, Italy and Iceland. In 1980, Orest was awarded the title of FIDE Master by the International Chess Federation. He won the New Jersey championship in 1959, 1961, 1985 and in 2001. In 2001 he authored a chess book featuring games by former champions of the Ukrainian Sports Federation of the USA and Canada. He was inducted into the Ukrainian Sports Federation Hall of Fame in 2016. He won the 1971 Atlantic Open and the championship of the Ukrainian Sports Federation nine times.

Dr. Orest Popovych was a member of the Shevchenko Scientific Society, and served as the president of this organization for two terms, from 2006 to 2012. The Shevchenko Scientific Society in the U.S. is a Ukrainian-American scholarly institution incorporated in 1948 in the state of New York. It traces its intellectual and scholarly lineage to the Shevchenko Scientific Society established in 1873 in Lviv, Ukraine which, until its dissolution by the Soviets in 1939, served as the preeminent Ukrainian scholarly society in Ukraine. The headquarters of the Society in the U.S. is located in New York City.

In 2010, Orest was awarded a prize for Best Translations from Ukrainian into English by the American Association for Ukrainian Studies for his English translations of three collections of Vasyl Machno’s poems which appeared in Agni, International Poetry Review and Poetry International. A collection of 33 of his English translations of Vasyl Machno’s Ukrainian poetry has been published as part of a bilingual book titled Thread and Selected New York Poems. His last contribution was the co-authoring of the third and fourth volume of the publication, The Encyclopedia of the Ukrainian Diaspora, with Dr. Lushnycky for the Shevchenko Scientific Society.

Visitation will be held on Friday, March 24, 2023 from 5:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m. at the Union Funeral Home, 1600 Stuyvesant Ave., Union, NJ 07083. Parastas at 7:30 p.m.

A funeral Service will be held on Saturday, March 25, 2023 at 10:30 a.m. at St. John's Ukrainian Catholic Church, 733 Sanford Avenue, Newark. Burial to follow at St. Andrew's Ukrainian Orthodox Cemetery, South Bound Brook, NJ.

In lieu of flowers, donations can be made to the Shevchenko Scientific Society, located at 63 4th Ave., New York, NY 10003. Phone no. 212-254-5130 or to the St. Volodymyr Foundation, in Lviv, https://stwf.org.ua, Ukraine founded by Orest’s cousin, Lesya Kripyakevych as a humanitarian aid organization aiding Ukrainian soldiers in the war in Ukraine. Checks can be forwarded to Maria Kvit-Flynn to 70 Calvert Ave. West, Edison, New Jersey 08820, (540) 553-1558.