Page 13 - AACL 25th anniversary

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ARSLLAN CEKAJ was born in 1947 in Gusi, part of the northern Albanian lands that were annexed by
Montenegro at the end of the Balkan Wars of 1912-1913. After completing elementary and high school education in Gucia, Arsllan attended the Academy of Fine Arts in Niksic from 1962 to 1968 and became an accomplished painter. Arsllan’s father was an Albanian activist throughout his life, and this put him on the “black list” of the Yugoslav Communist regime (when Montenegro was part of Yugoslavia) and its secret service. This meant that future prospects for Arsllan in Yugoslavia were very bleak. At the end of 1968, he decided to escape to Italy, where he joined an Albanian immigrant organization in Rome. Arsllan worked as an artist, specializing in the restoration of sixteenth-century fresco paintings. In 1969, he immigrated to the United States, settling in the heart of the Albanian and Italian community in the Bronx, New York. From 1969 to 1976, he worked as an artist in the studio of the well-known American artist Larry Rivers. From 1976 to 1980, he attended the New York School of Aviation, graduating at the top of his class. By the time he finished flight school, he had also successfully established a real estate company called Six Brothers Realty and later Dahill Laundry. In 2000, Arsllan joined the Albanian American Civic League in order to contribute to the resolution of the Albanian national cause. He has been married to his wife, Rozeta, for nineteen years, and they have a sixteen-year-old son, Kaplan. The Cekajs have a home in Brooklyn and a farm in upstate New York.
ZEF DEDIVANAJ was born in Albania in 1950 and fled the Communist country in 1969, spending time in a refugee camp in Italy before immigrating to the United States. (His two brothers and a sister were not able to immigrate until after the fall of Communism in the early 1990s.) Zef settled in Michigan, where he worked for thirty years for the General Motors Corporation. Zef has been a member of the Albanian American Civic League for the past fifteen years, and he was part of the Civic League’s historic delegation to Rome for the beatification of Mother Teresa at the Vatican in 2003. He and his wife, Tereze, are active members of St. Paul’s Albanian Catholic Church in Rochester Hills. They have seven successful adult children and eleven grandchildren.
GJERGJ DEDVUKAJ was born in Hoti, Montenegro. He left Montenegro as a teenager because of the discrimination against ethnic Albanians in what was then Yugoslavia. His early life experience would lead him to work for justice and liberty for all ethnic Albanians in the Balkans. After his arrival in the United States in the late 1960s, Gjergj became a member of the Organization of Jusuf Gervalla. As a member of Malesia e Madhe in New York, Gjergj participates in continuing efforts to promote legal rights for ethnic Albanians in Montenegro and to maintain their culture. Gjergj joined the Board of Directors of the Albanian American Civic League in the mid-1990s and was part of the historic Civic League delegation in 2003 to Albanian lands in Montenegro, led by Joe DioGuardi and Shirley Cloyes DioGuardi, with the late Congressman Tom Lantos. Gjergj is the founder and creative director of the Albanian musical folklore group Bashkimi Kombetar, which for the past two decades has performed and received awards in international festivals in Albania, Kosova, Macedonia, Montenegro, and Germany. In 2011, Gjerg founded the Albanian School in the Bronx to give children instruction in the Albanian language, music, and culture. In 2013, he was the honoree of the Gift of Life charity for his sponsorship of a Kosovar Albanian child, who was brought to the United States to undergo heart surgery. Gjergj is the proprietor of Giovanni’s Restaurant in the Bronx. He and his wife, Shaqja, have four adult children, Nick, Peter, Frank, and Drita, and two grandchildren, Nico and Arben.
88 Saluting Albanian Religious Tolerance in an Age of Intolerance 13