On a Saturday morning in Jenkintown, Pennsylvania, you can hear children reciting Ukrainian verbs in a classroom off Cedar Road while, a short drive away, the bells of a Byzantine church ring for the Divine Liturgy on a calendar that runs thirteen days behind the rest of the town. The Ukrainians in Jenkintown did not arrive all at once, and they did not arrive by accident. They followed a path laid by nuns, by displaced families, and by a credit union that began with a few hundred dollars and a promise of self-reliance. This affluent Philadelphia suburb of roughly 4,750 people has become, improbably, one of the most important addresses in Ukrainian America.
The Place
Jenkintown is a small borough in Montgomery County, about ten miles north of central Philadelphia. It was named for William Jenkins, a Welsh settler who arrived around 1697, and the borough was carved out of Abington Township and incorporated on 8 December 1874.
Its prosperity dates from the railroad. The North Pennsylvania Railroad reached the area in 1856, and by the 1870s residents could board a train directly for New York. That early access to the city turned Jenkintown into a comfortable commuter town, and it has stayed one: the median household income today sits above $110,000, well over the Pennsylvania average.
It is a place of tree-lined streets, a walkable old commercial centre, and a 1932 Reading Railroad station that still serves SEPTA trains. It is also, just past its borders, the institutional heart of Philadelphia’s Ukrainian world.
How It Became Ukrainian
The Ukrainian story in greater Philadelphia is older than the suburb that now anchors it. To understand why so much Ukrainian life clusters around Jenkintown, you have to start in the city, and with a single religious order.
The city first
The earliest Ukrainian immigrants to Philadelphia settled in Northern Liberties, between 6th and 7th Streets south of Girard Avenue, in a quarter that came to be called Little Ukraine. The anchor was the parish of the Immaculate Conception, whose first cathedral building was purchased in 1907 by Bishop Soter Ortynsky, the first bishop of Ukrainian Catholics in America.
That community was built by the first wave of immigrants, the labourers and factory hands who crossed the Atlantic in the late nineteenth century. They came for work, and they brought their church with them. Philadelphia would grow into the second-largest centre of Ukrainian life in the United States, behind only New York, with more than 60,000 people of Ukrainian descent across the region.
The Sisters arrive
The thread that leads to Jenkintown runs through the Sisters of the Order of Saint Basil the Great, a Ukrainian Catholic order whose members began arriving in the Philadelphia area in 1911. In 1947, three of these nuns founded a school north of the city to educate Ukrainian American children. They called it Manor.
Manor College, as it became, was chartered by Pennsylvania in 1959 and sits on Fox Chase Road with a Jenkintown mailing address. It started as a small institution rooted in faith and language, and it remains tied to the Basilian Sisters, whose members still serve on its board. By 2024 it enrolled close to 600 students and had begun granting bachelor’s degrees, but its Ukrainian heart never left.
The displaced persons
The community that filled out around these institutions came largely with the third wave of Ukrainian immigration, the displaced persons who arrived between 1947 and 1955. Almost all of them had passed through the camps of postwar Austria and Germany, uprooted by the war and unwilling or unable to return to a Soviet Ukraine.
They came not for opportunity alone but to keep something alive. As Manor College’s dean of mission, Nicholas Rudnytzky, has put it, for immigrants who had lived under Soviet rule, knowing and maintaining the language and the culture was treated as a responsibility, not a hobby. That conviction would shape everything they built.
Building the institutions
By the 1970s the community had grown prosperous and confident enough to put down permanent roots in the suburbs. In 1972, the School of the Voloshky Ukrainian Dance Ensemble was founded under the direction of Zoia Hraur Korsun, teaching the precise, athletic folk dance of the homeland.
In 1975, parishioners established Saint Michael the Archangel Ukrainian Catholic Church in Jenkintown, with families reportedly mortgaging their own homes to purchase the property. And in 1977, Manor College opened its Ukrainian Heritage Studies Center, gathering a library, an archive, and a museum of Ukrainian folk art under one roof.
The capstone came in 1980. After a parents’ committee from the Ukrainian Saturday school began searching for a permanent home, the Ukrainian Educational and Cultural Center was founded, its first board elected on 19 October 1980 and the building dedicated on 19 September 1981. Dr. Alexander Chernyk led the effort. Within a generation, Jenkintown had acquired a church, a college, a cultural centre, a dance school, and a credit union, all within a few miles of one another.
The newest arrivals
A fourth wave followed the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, when more than 146,000 people came from Ukraine to the United States between 1993 and 2001. Many gravitated to the same Philadelphia suburbs, drawn by the schools and churches the earlier waves had built. The Russian invasion of 2022 brought another influx, and the existing institutions absorbed them.
The Landmarks
Manor College, 700 Fox Chase Road. Founded in 1947 by Basilian Sisters, with a Jenkintown mailing address on the Abington line, this is the institution that started it all. Its Ukrainian Heritage Studies Center, opened in 1977, holds a museum of traditional Ukrainian arts, a research library, and an archive. The campus motto, fittingly, is “You Belong Here.”
Ukrainian Educational and Cultural Center, 700 Cedar Road. Founded in 1980, the UECC is the focal point of Ukrainian American cultural life in the Delaware Valley. It houses more than thirty community organisations, a Ukrainian library, a daycare, and a twelve-year Saturday school teaching language, history, music, and culture to hundreds of children.
Saint Michael the Archangel Ukrainian Catholic Church, 1013 Fox Chase Road. Established in 1975 by parishioners who mortgaged their homes to buy the land, this is the only Ukrainian Catholic parish in the Philadelphia area that still keeps the Julian calendar, celebrating its feasts thirteen days after the Western dates. Its liturgies are sung in Ukrainian.
School of the Voloshky Ukrainian Dance Ensemble, 700 Cedar Road. Founded in 1972 and housed inside the UECC, Voloshky trains some 170 dancers aged four to sixteen in the high-kicking, ribbon-bright folk dance that has become an emblem of Ukrainian identity abroad. The ensemble performs across the country and at regional festivals.
Ukrainian Selfreliance Federal Credit Union, 700 N Cedar Road. A branch of a credit union founded in 1952 that traces its philosophy to a self-reliance movement born in Ukraine more than a century ago. After the 2022 invasion its membership swelled past 11,000 as Ukrainians in the region rallied; it now manages well over $350 million in assets.
Sisters of the Order of Saint Basil the Great. The Basilian order whose members arrived in the area in 1911 and founded Manor College in 1947. From their convent near the campus they have continued teaching, praying, and, after 2022, organising shipments of medicine and supplies to Ukraine, sending the prayers along free of charge.
Where They Came From
The Ukrainians who built Jenkintown’s institutions came in distinct waves, each from a different Ukraine. The first arrivals of the late nineteenth century were largely peasants and labourers from the western regions of Galicia and Transcarpathia, then under Austro-Hungarian rule, who had no nation-state of their own to name.
The pivotal third wave, the displaced persons of the late 1940s and early 1950s, came from across Ukraine but shared the experience of the war and the camps. Many were educated, politically conscious, and determined that the culture Stalin had tried to erase would survive in exile. They are the ones who built the church, the centre, and the schools.
The post-1991 wave came from an independent Ukraine, seeking work and stability rather than refuge. The most recent arrivals, after 2022, came fleeing a full-scale war, and found a community already equipped with schools, churches, and a credit union waiting to receive them.
Jenkintown Today
Jenkintown remains a prosperous, mostly white commuter borough, and the casual visitor might pass through without noticing anything Ukrainian about it at all. The gold domes are in the city; the suburb’s Ukrainian life is quieter, folded into the schedules of Saturday schools and the parking lots of cultural centres on Cedar and Fox Chase Roads.
But it is unmistakably there. After Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022, the area became a hub of relief work. At Saint Michael the Archangel, hundreds of parishioners cooked and sold food to fund medical supplies, helmets, and body armour, and the church treasurer Danylo Pidkova reported that the parish had already shipped around 500 first aid kits overseas. The Basilian Sisters gathered medicine. The credit union saw its rolls swell with new members.
For more on the wider story of Ukrainians in the East Village of Manhattan and the great Midwestern enclaves of Ukrainian Village in Chicago and Ukrainians in Parma, Ohio, the pattern is familiar: a church, a school, a credit union, and a hall, repeated in city after city. Jenkintown is the Philadelphia chapter of that story, and like the affluent enclaves built by Indians in Collegeville and Jews in Wynnewood elsewhere in the Philadelphia suburbs, it shows how a small Pennsylvania town can hold a community’s entire institutional life.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why are there so many Ukrainians in Jenkintown, Pennsylvania?
The Ukrainians in Jenkintown clustered there because the suburb became the institutional centre of Philadelphia’s Ukrainian community. Manor College, founded by Basilian Sisters in 1947, drew Ukrainian families to the area, and the Ukrainian Educational and Cultural Center, a church, a dance school, and a credit union followed nearby.
When did Ukrainians first settle in the Philadelphia area?
The first Ukrainian immigrants arrived in Philadelphia in the late nineteenth century, settling in the Northern Liberties neighbourhood known as Little Ukraine. The community grew through later waves, especially the displaced persons who arrived between 1947 and 1955 after the Second World War.
What is the Ukrainian Educational and Cultural Center in Jenkintown?
Founded in 1980 at 700 Cedar Road, the Ukrainian Educational and Cultural Center is the focal point of Ukrainian American cultural life in the Delaware Valley. It houses more than thirty organisations, a Ukrainian library, a daycare, and a twelve-year Saturday school teaching Ukrainian language and culture.
Is Manor College a Ukrainian institution?
Yes. Manor College was founded in 1947 by the Ukrainian Catholic Sisters of the Order of Saint Basil the Great and retains close ties to the Ukrainian Catholic Church. Its Ukrainian Heritage Studies Center, opened in 1977, includes a museum, library, and archive of Ukrainian culture.
What makes Saint Michael the Archangel church unusual?
Saint Michael the Archangel Ukrainian Catholic Church in Jenkintown, established in 1975, is the only Ukrainian Catholic parish in the Philadelphia area that still follows the Julian calendar. Its feast days fall thirteen days after the Western dates, and its liturgies are sung in Ukrainian.
How did the Jenkintown Ukrainian community respond to the 2022 invasion?
The Ukrainians in Jenkintown mobilised quickly. Parishioners at Saint Michael the Archangel cooked and sold food to fund medical supplies and body armour for Ukraine, the Basilian Sisters shipped medicine, and the Ukrainian Selfreliance Federal Credit Union saw its membership grow past 11,000.
If your family’s story passed through Jenkintown, or any of the places Ukrainians have made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From a displaced persons camp in postwar Europe to a Saturday school on Cedar Road, to wherever you are now.