In the capital of California, at the age of 80, the infamous Pentecostal Bishop Adam Semyonovich Bondaruk died, he was the head of the Bethany Slavic Missionary Church and the Union of Evangelical Christians of America. His death was announced by pastor Vitaly Yasinsky during the Sunday service.
Adam Bondaruk was born in 1942 in the village of Senyavka, Volyn region of Ukraine, in the family of Bondaruk Semyon Vasilyevich and Ksenia Mikhailovna. For some time Adam Bondaruk was leading the Pentecostal church in Kohtla-Jarve (Estonian SSR). He also worked at the Tammiku mine as an excavator driver. In 1989, the Bondaruk family migrated to the USA, Massachusetts, and then to Sacramento, California.
In 2009, the public was shocked by the arrest of the children of high-ranking members of the leadership of the Bethany Slavic Missionary Church, who were accused of a high scale real estate fraud in California. A number of individuals, including the Kuzmenko family – Vera, Nadezhda, Pyotr – and Bondaruk Pyotr, got lengthy prison terms.
Currently, one of the bishop Bondaruk’s sons, Pyotr Bondaruk, is serving his 6-year sentence in a California federal prison.
In March 2020, Adam Bondaruk was hospitalized with COVID-19 symptoms and spent one month in a hospital in the Sacramento region. At the same time, several ministers of the Bethany Church died from COVID-19.
In 2020, the local health service uncovered one of the largest Covid outbreaks in the United States – more than 70 members of the Bethany Church or people associated with it contracted highly contagious coronavirus.
