Page 14 - AACL 25th anniversary

Anniversary Celebration of
Albanian American Civic League
ADEM DUKAJ was born in Dinosha in 1935, an Albanian village that became part of Montenegro after the Balkans wars of 1912-1913. Adem grew up in an environment of hardship and loss after nearly all of the men in Dinosha, including his grandfather, lost their lives in their resistance to the invasion of Serb and Montenegrin armies. As a toddler, Adem heard his grandmother mourn the loss of her husband and brother. In 1941, during World War II, Adem’s father was detained by the occupying powers. At only six years of age, Adem ran away from home to find his father in jail in Shkodra, where he spent two weeks with him until they could return to Dinosha. Two years later, the Nazis attacked Dinosha, and Adem’s mother was killed when the town was leveled in an air raid. After World War II, Tito’s Communist party took over the region, and poverty and lack of freedom became the norm. Adem managed to continue his education, and in 1956 he was the first in his generation to graduate from a technical school in the field of electrical engineering. At the same time, Yugoslavia’s secret police, UDBA, began to call him in for questioning as an Albanian speaking out for freedom. Attempting to escape Montenegro, Adem was jailed for a year and a half. On his second attempt, he succeeded in entering Slovenia, scaled the Alps on foot, and crossed into Austria, where he was received as a refugee for several months before immigrating to Canada. In 1961, he immigrated to the United States. In 1990, a year after the Albanian
American Civic League was formed, Adem became a Board member. In 1998, with fellow Board member Haki Dervishi, he financed the printing of 10,000 copies of Harvey Sarner’s Rescue in Albania, which tells the story of the Albanian rescue of European Jewry during the Holocaust and which Sarner assigned to the Civic League to distribute. The book was critical to bringing international attention to the genocidal attack of Serbian dictator Slobodan Milosevic on the 92 percent Albanian population of Kosova during the Balkan wars of the 1990s. Adem is the founder and CEO of V&S Engineering, a successful machine and fabrication company in Huntington Beach, California. He resides with his wife, Nuria, in Orange County, and they have five adult children and five young grandchildren.
FERO GJONBALAJ was born in Gusi, Montenegro, on July 1950. In December 1968, at the age of
eighteen, Fero refused to enter college because he would not be able to speak in Albanian and would have to continue speaking Serbo-Croatian and studying Slavic history. To avoid assimilation, he decided to escape Yugoslavia, and his family was able to bribe a Communist official to get a passport for him. After gaining asylum in Italy. Fero immigrated to the United States and began working in New York City in the building maintenance industry for the next twenty-eight years. He became a supervisor of maintenance in Manhattan’s high rise buildings, working for major companies such as National Cleaning Contractors and Perfect Building Maintenance. In the process, he brought hundreds of Albanian Americans into the industry. When he retired in 1998, he opened Champion Marble and Granite, Inc., a successful company in Manalapan, New Jersey, with his younger brother, Sadri, who had immigrated to the United States at the age of seven with their parents and brother Steve in 1974. Sadri went on to become an Olympian and a world-renowned soccer player who earned five caps with the U.S. national team, before retiring to run Champion Marble. Brother Steve became a successful restaurateur, who today is the owner and operator of the acclaimed SamVera restaurant in Marlboro, New Jersey. Fero and his late wife, Bedrije, are the parents of four successful adult children.
SAMI V. JONUZI was born on March 5, 1959, in the Albanian village of Qafa near Gostivar in the Former Yugoslav
Republic of Macedonia. In December 1977, he moved to the United States following his brothers Murtezan and Ajrulla, who had been subject to Communist Yugoslav Systematic interrogation “as enemies of the state.” Eldest brother Murtezan played a major role in getting the family out of the country at extreme risk of being caught and imprisoned. After graduating from high school, Sami earned a bachelor’s of science degree in biochemistry from Rowan University in Glassboro, New Jersey, in 1986, a doctorate degree in naturopathy from the Trinity College of Natural Medicine in 2001, and an integrative health practitioner degree at the Advanced Integrative Medical Institute in Washington, DC, in 2002. Sami is an Adjunct Professor at the College of Natural Therapies and a member of the American Association of Integrative Medicine. In 2002, he founded the Atlantic Integrative Medical Center, with offices in West Atlantic City and Jersey City. He has been married to Shazie for 32 years and is the proud father of daughter, Valvona, who has a master’s degree in psychology, and son, Kreshnik, who has a master’s degree in television and media communication. Sami has been a member of the AACL Board of Directors for the past twenty years.
ZUDI KARAGJOZI was born and raised in New York with his two younger siblings, Angel and Sheptim.
Zudi's parents, Rose and Agim, were born in Albania and their families became political refugees in World War II. Zudi grew up with a strong commitment to serve the Albanian community. His father, Agim Karagjozi, is the Honorary President of the Pan Albanian Federation of America (Vatra). His maternal grandparents were among the founders of Bali Kombetar (the National Front) during World War II, which was established to protect the Albanian nation from the Nazis and later the Communists. As a first generation Albanian-American, Zudi was the spokesperson for Vatra during the Kosova War and appeared on many television and radio shows. He was especially active with the Albanian American Civic League, calling for support from Congress for the independence of Kosova, and he joined its Board of Directors in 2010. Zudi had been a builder, a developer, and investor in residential and commercial properties for the past 37 years. He and his wife, Lysbeth, have three children, and they reside in New Jersey.
14
Saluting Albanian Religious Tolerance in an Age of Intolerance