Архив форума сайта «Живая Этика в мире» (2006-2013)

Sunday, May 23, 2004, Chandigarh, India

http://www.tribuneindia.com/2004/20040523/herworld.htm

[center]Custodian of a culture

Alexander M. Kadakin pays a tribute to Sister Ursula, the much-loved manager of Roerich’s art gallery in Naggar, Kulu[/center]

ANY visitor to the Roerich Gallery in Naggar, Kulu Valley, would remember Sister Ursula, the grey-haired, amiable old lady. She reminded one of our grannies, the babushkas, in whose wooden village houses we would spend summer holidays as children. Ursula Eichstaedt, or Sister Ursula as everybody lovingly addressed her, lived a life devoted to serving other people. She displayed an amazing zest for life and compassion throughout her life, sincerely striving to make the world more just.

As a teenager, Ursula had to face travails and atrocities of war that took her family away. Afterwards, charitable work became her sole mission in life. After the war, working with the UN Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, Ursula worked towards rehabilitation of German children. Under a UNICEF programme, she spent a year as a medical nurse among Pakhtuns and Baluchs in the North-Western Frontier Province of Pakistan.

In 1954, her adolescent dream, nurtured after reading Altai-Himalayas by Nicholas Roerich, was fulfilled. She arrived in India on a charity mission under the aegis of an international organisation. Like the Roerichs, she made India her second home and lived here till her last breath. It was here that she found a new family by adopting two Indian brothers as infants from an Orissa jungle tribe where she had spent 18 years, working among local lepers.

Almost 20 years more were devoted to orphans in children's charities set up under the Pestalozzi Children's Village and SOS Children's Village trusts in various parts of India, mainly in hard-to-reach mountainous regions. In 1989, at the request of Svyatoslav Roerich and Devika Rani-Roerich, whom Sister Ursula had met in 1954, she became the custodian of their beautiful estate in Kulu.

Ursula was the permanent manager of the Russian-Indian Roerich Memorial Trust ever since it was established in 1992 and the estate opened to the public. It was due to her involvement, self-denial and generosity that the priceless collection was preserved, transforming the gallery into the most frequently visited heritage sites in the western Himalayas. More than one lakh tourists visit this gallery annually.

For over 15 years, Ursula worked with enthusiasm, devoting all her spiritual and physical energies to the supervision of the museum. She spent her meagre savings and modest pension to save the common Russian-Indian heritage. But for this effort, the Roerichs' legacy would have perished. Today, the centre, a symbol of spiritual and cultural affinity between India and Russia stands as a cultural centre par excellence.

Sister Ursula also found time for charity even here by helping the school for Tibetan children in Pathlikul, off Naggar. Several films were made about her remarkable life; in 1962 her selfless effort won her a highly coveted award from the City Council of Rome, which, along with Indira Gandhi, she received personally from the Supreme Pontiff.

Despite all the tribulations and three years as a POW in a Soviet camp, Ursula had a special affection for Russia. She visited Russia at the invitation of her numerous Russian friends. In these parts, she was known as the "Russian" Sister Ursula. She passed away as quietly as she had lived. An embodiment of compassion, she touched numerous lives with love and was a beacon of light in an atrocities-torn world.

Tibetan Bulletin online
Volume 8, Issue 4
July - August 2004

http://www.tibet.net/en/tibbul/2004/0708/features2.html

[center]Magdalene Duckwitz Remembers a Friend[/center]

Sister Ursula Eichstädt, a trained midwife and social worker from Kiel in North Germany with experience among the poor in North Finland and South Italy, came to India in 1955 under a UNESCO scheme. She stayed on to work for the "Gandhi Smarak Nidhi" in Orissa to eradicate a venereal disease common among tribals. After successfully completing this task, she turned to leprosy relief and rehabilitation work. While working in Koraput District, she brought up two orphaned brothers as her own children. Ursula totally identified herself with her work and those whom she helped. She was young, vibrant, energetic and creative; she walked and swam through rivers, her equipment floating in front of her, to save the lives of mothers and infants. Her talks were powerful and convincing; she knew what to say and how to act. She had a great humane personality, even in her old age and physical afflictions.

Having experienced many encounters with tigers, bears and elephants in the fields and jungles of Orissa, she acquired a gun for her self-defence. Her humanitarian work became widely known through a German TV film on her work in Orissa. In the sixties Sister Ursula was awarded the Isabella d’Este Prize for Social Work by the City of Rome, shared by Indira Gandhi, who received it for diplomacy. The two prize-winners spent four days together in Rome and became friends. Thereafter, whenever she was in Delhi, Ursula used to call on Indira Gandhi and was invited for private family dinners at No. 1 Akbar Road, where the Prime Minister requested her to relate her encounters with wild beasts to her sons Rajiv and Sanjay: On a cycle ride through the jungle a tiger attacked her and she was thrown off; and the tiger, clinging to the cycle, went helter-skelter down the hill. Her medical helper, who carried her gun, eventually shot the tiger. She herself had to be carried with a broken rib to a faraway hospital. On another occasion a female bear charged on her, and she had to shoot the animal to save her own life. She then wrote to the Embassy that she now slept on a bear-skin as the ancient Germans used to do. Many a times at night at the request of the villagers, who possessed no weapons, Ursula had to shoot in the air to prevent herds of wild elephants from destroying the farmers’ crops. Years later, in 1984, when Ursula came back to visit her elder foster-son Jiringa, who was farming in Orissa, she attended there the last rally held by Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, a few days before her death. She met her and later on told us that Indira had premonitions of her impending death.

After winding up her leprosy relief work in Orissa, a region and its tribal culture she loved dearly, and which language she spoke fluently, Ursula was instrumental in building up the SOS Children’s Village for Tibetan refugees in Dharamsala. When the German humanitarian organisation "German Agro Action" took over the patronage for the Pestalozzi Children’s Village established by a South Indian philanthropic industrialist near Bangalore, Ursula was asked to reorganize the Village. She did so against many odds and, during a flood catastrophe in the east coast of India, she personally picked up in her Jeep the orphaned children from the devastated countryside and gave them a new home and shelter in the Village. During this time the First German Television company (ARD) produced near Bangalore a second film on Sister Ursula’s life and work entitled "Wiedersehen mit Schwester Ursula"("Re-Encounter with Sister Ursula").

As her second foster-son Ganesh Bredeke had meanwhile settled down in Switzerland, Sister Ursula returned to Europe, adding new assignments to her colourful and adventurous career: the excellent horse-woman that she was, Ursula joined riding schools in Italy and Germany, where she introduced therapeutic riding for handicapped children. Alongside these activities she was fighting a silent battle against leprosy which she had contracted while in Orissa. She won the battle and returned to India at the request of Svetoslav Roerich and his actress wife Devika Rani whom she had previously met in Bangalore and who wanted her to be caretaker of the Roerich Foundation at Nagar Estate in the Kulu valley, and its Roerich Research Institute and Art Museum. Under the patronage of the Indian and Russian Governments, Ursula worked ceaselessly and enthusiastically for the preservation and development of this unique Indo-Russian heritage project. In recognition of her exemplary work, the German Federal Government honoured her with the Order of Merit.

Sister Ursula passed away in the Kulu Valley on 15 May 2004. She will be remembered as a devoted friend of India whose selfless work for humanitarian causes in this country of her love should never be forgotten.

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Magdalene Duckwitz is an indologist who formerly was Cultural Attaché at the German Embassy