Rebet, Dariia

Rebet, Dariia [Ребет, Дарія; née Цісик; Tsisyk], b 26 February 1913 in Kitsman, Bukovyna, d 5 January 1992 in Munich. Political leader and publicist; wife of Lev Rebet. She studied law at Lviv University and Lublin University. As a young woman she joined the clandestine Ukrainian Military Organization and its successor, the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN). In the 1930s she was OUN youth representative and headed the OUN women’s groups of the OUN Stryi district executive and the OUN organization in the Stryi district (1933–4). In 1935–8 she was a member of the OUN Home Executive in Western Ukraine responsible for liaison with the émigré Leadership of Ukrainian Nationalists. In 1939 she spent six months in a Polish prison. In 1941 she became a member of the Cracow-based OUN (Bandera faction) Home Executive, headed by Roman Shukhevych. During the German occupation of Lviv she worked in the OUN educational and propaganda sectors. She was a delegate at the OUN Third Extraordinary Congress in 1943, and in 1944 she was a member of the OUN Preparatory Commission, which organized the Ukrainian Supreme Liberation Council (UHVR). She was elected to the first UHVR presidium and was the author of the first UHVR statute. While living as a postwar émigré in Germany she was a member of the UHVR Representation Abroad. When the émigré OUN (Bandera faction) split in 1956, she joined the new OUN (Abroad) and was elected to its Political Council, which she headed from 1979. Rebet was active in Ukrainian émigré women’s organizations and was a delegate to the First World Congress of Ukrainian Women in Philadelphia in 1948. She was a member of the editorial boards of Suchasna Ukraïna, Suchasnist’, and Ukraïns’kyi samostiinyk and edited a collection of articles about the Ukrainian Women's Alliance in Germany (1980). She was the author of articles dealing with the OUN ideology, program, and history, Ukrainian liberation politics, the UHVR, Soviet affairs, Ukrainian émigré community concerns, and educational issues. A book of Dariia Rebet’s memoirs was published in Lviv in 2019.

[This article was updated in 2019.]