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Jehovah's Witnesses

The Jehovah's Witnesses in Ukraine have

• 655 communities
• 1640 ministers
• 276 churches
• 27 churches are being built*

The history of the Jehovah's Witnesses in Ukraine began in the 1890s. In 1891 the president of the Watch Tower Society and founder of the Jehovah's Witnesses movement, Charles Taze Russel, visited Odessa on his way to Constantinople. A few years later, Ukrainians who had traveled to the United States in search of work began to send bible publications to their relatives. Some of these emigrants returned to Ukraine and formed bible study groups. On March 24, 1911 Russel traveled to Lviv to give a bible speech to the residents of the city.

In 1926 a Bible Study office was established in Lviv on Pekarska Street. In 1939, at the beginning of World War Two, the preaching activity of over 1000 active Witnesses was forbidden. During the war many of them suffered and some perished. After the war the repressions continued and reached their peak in April, 1951, when over 6100 Witnesses from western Ukraine were exiled to Siberia for life.

The government's hostility toward the Witnesses began to decrease at the end of the 1980s. The Jehovah's Witnesses Religious Organization was officially registered in Ukraine on February 28, 1991. This was the first registration of Jehovah's Witnesses on the territory of the former USSR.

After a six year search, in early 1998 the Witnesses found an ideal location to build a new administrative center in a pine forest 5 kilometers north of Lviv in the suburb of Briukhovychi. Witnesses from the regional engineering bureau in Germany helped a Ukrainian architect with the design and planning.

In the fall of 1998 the first brigade of international volunteers arrived and building began. Various volunteers participated in the effort, but the largest number of volunteers were involved in the work in September of 2000: at that time 329 people from 28 different countries were helping in the building effort. During the 2 and 1/2 year construction period, 650,000 bricks were laid over 16,000 square meters. The center was finally opened on May 19, 2001.

There are currently 115,000 Jehovah's Witnesses preaching in Ukraine.
(* These initial statistics are supplied by the Ukrainian Government Committee on Religious Matters and are current as of January 1, 2001. The rest of the information on this page has been supplied by the Governing Office of the Jehovah's Witnesses Religious Organization in Ukraine)