CU Sponsors Museum Exhibit About Chernobyl

NEW YORK – The $540 million Self Reliance New York FCU is sponsoring a multimedia and interactive exhibit on the tragedy in the Chernobyl region of Ukraine and the mostly elderly people who still live in villages within the so-called 19-mile exclusionary zone. The exhibit tracks what happened in Chernobyl on April 26, 1986 when the atomic energy plant in the city partially melted down and spewed radioactive material into the air for days. The accident eventually led to the evacuation of 160,000 people and 19 villages in the surrounding area. But not everyone left, and the exhibit documents the lives of the people who remained. “We thought it was a worthy cause and a good thing to do,” explained Bohdan Kekish, CEO of Self Reliance, an ethic Ukrainian credit union whose field of membership includes the members of the Self Reliance Association of American Ukrainians. Kekish explained that the credit union has a history of sponsoring Ukrainian cultural events and education and has sponsored other recent exhibits at the newly opened Ukrainian Museum.