Joseph and Alexandra Kazickas

   The wonderful love story of Joseph and Alexandra Kazickas is portrayed in their memoir, "The Odyssey of Hope". Joseph was born in 1918 to a Lithuanian family in exile on the steppes of Russia. Alexandra was born in 1920 in Lithuania and was orphaned in her teenage years. They both met while studying at the university in Vilnius, got married and a year after their daughter was born, had to flee then soviet occupied Lithuania in 1944. In the United States, they became parents to four boys and Joseph earned his PhD in economics at Yale University and became a successful, world-traveling businessman. Those years as refugees in Germany in the aftermath of the war affected them deeply.  

    For many years, while Lithuania was still under the soviet regime, Joseph and Alexandra supported numerous Lithuanian causes, opening their home in New Rochelle for private gatherings of their friends who strove to keep their culture, tradition and language a vital force in their lives. When Sajudis, the independence movement began in Lithuania in the late 1980s, the family worked tirelessly to aid the efforts of activists in their homeland. Joseph organized meetings with influential U.S. government officials to promote the cause of freedom.

    When independence was finally re-established in 1991, Joseph was already busy encouraging private investment in the newly liberated country. He helped start the first cellular phone company - Omnitel - in Lithuania and eventually established the Kazickas Family Foundation which is now the largest private philanthropic institution in Lithuania.