Pastor marks last Easter at church

Throughout their nearly 50 years of marriage, Irene Soroka helped her husband prepare for services, sang in the choir and served on various parish organizations. They had four children. Her death in 2004 was “a big loss to the church as well as myself,” he said.

After Father Soroka entered the priesthood, the local bishop agreed to Donora parishioners’ request that he be their pastor. They had known him from his work with his father in nearby Charleroi.

The Donora parish was founded by Slavic immigrants from Russia and the Carpathian borderlands of Eastern Europe. Parishioners built the sanctuary brick-by-yellowbrick after their shifts at the mills.

When Father Soroka started at St. Nicholas, the parish had about 120 members, he recalled. Like many Mon Valley churches, Orthodox and otherwise, it has decreased, along with the region’s population and industry, but it maintains a vibrant congregation of about 70, he said.

In the 1960s, when the mills were closing, Father Soroka and other Christian and Jewish clergy organized in an attempt to ease the blow. “We would meet with the union people and the officers and so forth and with the local authorities, the mill owners, to see if we could get things going.” But the mill owners “had made up their mind” to close. He later served as president of the Donora Chamber of Commerce and on committees to revitalize downtown and the economy.

Music in his heart