John Jowa (Iwan Jowa, Іван Йова, Ivan Iova) was born on January 8, 1914 in the village of Dmytrovka, Zolotonosha uezd, Poltava gubernia of the Russian Empire (now Dmytrivka, Zolotonosha raion, Cherkasy oblast', Ukraine) and was one of four children in a land-owning farmer family of kozak background. As a result of Stalin's collectivization effort, he was classified as a "kurkul'" and was sent to Siberia. He managed to escape, and lived in hiding in Ukraine until World War II. He came to the United States as a Displaced Person in December, 1949. He lived in New York City, where he worked as a union carpenter. He served as president and secretary of the New York City chapter of the Democratic Organization of Ukrainians Formerly Persecuted by the Soviet Regime in the 1950s, and was an officer of the Association of Former Ukrainian Political Prisoners. He died in New York on September 23, 1991.

The Democratic Organization of Ukrainians Formerly Persecuted by the Soviet Regime (in Ukrainian, "Демократичне Об'єднання Бувших Репресованих Українців Совєтами"), also known by the Ukrainian acronym DOBRUS ("ДОБРУС") was an organization of post-World War II Ukrainian refugees in the United States who had suffered repression at the hands of the Soviet government. It was founded in New York City in January, 1950 as an initiative of the Ukrainian Revolutionary Democratic Party (Українська революційно-демократична партія) with the mission of uncovering, documenting, and publicizing the repressive policies of the Soviet Union, as well as discrimination against non-Russian ethnic groups within the Soviet Union. It published a number of books in Ukrainian and English, and had local affiliate groups in several US cities and internationally. It ceased activity in 1984.

The Association of Former Ukrainian Political Prisoners of Soviet and Other Totalitarian Regimes in the U.S.A. (in Ukrainian, "Asotsiatsia Ukrains'kykh Politychnykh Viazniv", acronym AUPV) was an organization that appears to have broken off from DOBRUS at some point in the mid-1950s. It had branches in New York City, Cleveland, and other cities.