On Sunday, January 25, Metropolitan Nicholas of Eastern America & New York officiated the 75th anniversary of Holy Epiphany Church in Roslindale (Boston), MA. After Liturgy a banquet was held, during which Professor Leonid R. Heretz read on the history of the people of the parish. The lecture was delivered in Russian; an English translation was provided and is available below:
Your Eminence,
Reverend fathers,
Dear parishioners and guests!
I was given the somewhat complicated task of telling you the story of our parish in 20 minutes. I will try to do that in the following way: I will begin by telling you about the generation of the founders of our church, and then I will sketch out how the parish grew and changed over time. So as not to neglect any one individual person, I will not refer to any individual person by name. I will try to talk about our community as a whole, as a single spiritual organism, insofar as it is given to me, a sinner, to understand that. However, during my talk the slideshow of the history of the parish will continue, and we will see the faces of our loved ones and thereby remember them as individuals.
Our parish was founded by refugees. Their life experience was radically different from yours and mine. They had lived through some of the greatest cataclysms in human history – world wars, revolutions, civil wars (note the plurals), dispossession, repression. It is worth noting that almost all of them had been under aerial bombardment, and that more than once. After the Second World War, most of the future founders of our parish found themselves in the western zones of Germany, amidst millions of people of various nationalities who had been uprooted in the course of the gargantuan conflict. There, the American and British occupational authorities either sent them home (whether they wanted to go or not), or else placed them in camps for so-called Displaced Persons. Among the DPs there were many Russian Orthodox Christians. There were people who came from the territories of the Soviet Union which had been occupied by the Germans, as well as Soviet prisoners of war. There were people from the predominantly Orthodox eastern regions of prewar Poland. In addition, there were many White Guard émigrés with their families from Yugoslavia and the Baltic states – these people had had, for yet another time in their lives, to abandon everything and flee into the unknown in the face of the advancing communist menace.
Religious life in the camps was organized by clergy of the Russian Church Abroad. That Church, which is our Church, was established on the basis of Patriarchal Ukase № 362, which provided for the organization of ecclesiastical life for the millions of Russian Orthodox people who found themselves outside the boundaries of their native land as a result of the Revolution and Civil War. In 1921, the Synod of Bishops Outside of Russia was established, with a central administration located in Sremski Karlovci in Yugoslavia. For a time, all Russian Orthodox Christians abroad, included those in America, acknowledged the authority of the Synod, and the Synod in turn recognized the Patriarch in Moscow as the earthly head of the Russian Orthodox Church. However, once it became clear that emigration was not going to be a temporary condition, political and other disputes caused Russians abroad to split up into various rival jurisdictions, and the Synod retained the loyalty of the more conservative portion of the emigration, geographically concentrated in Yugoslavia and China. Then, in 1927, the Synod of Bishops Abroad broke relations with the Church leadership in Moscow, because of the latter’s adoption, after the Patriarch’s death, of a new strategy for survival under militant atheist Soviet rule.
After the Second World War the Synod set up headquarters in Munich, which was under American occupation, and the center of gravity of the Church Abroad shifted to western Germany. At that time American policy drastically limited immigration, but once the Cold War got going, the U.S. Congress made an exception for the refugees, most of whom were very anticommunist, and by virtue of the Displaced Persons Act of 1948, hundreds of thousands of people, including the founders our parish, were granted the right to enter the United States.
Many DPs, or as they sometimes jokingly called themselves, "Delayed Pilgrims," moved to Boston, which at that time was still a major industrial center. Several of the leaders of the relatively small White Guard emigration in Boston saw in this influx of new people the possibility of establishing a parish of the Church Abroad here. Through the joint efforts of the new immigrants with the old, our Church of the Holy Epiphany was founded in 1951. In a relatively short time, the membership of the parish was augmented by Russian emigrants from South America, North Africa, and China. Among the active parishioners of those years there were also Bulgarians.
As would be expected with a community of recent immigrants, liturgical life began in humble circumstances, in a borrowed, temporary location. The Greek Orthodox Cathedral in Boston generously provided our parish with the use of its baptismal chapel for services – and that is why we are the Church of the Epiphany (if the name of John the Baptist had been chosen instead, we would not be having today’s drama with the weather). A few years later, the parishioners acquired their own building, one that had earlier been a Methodist church. This was located in an affordable, which is to say, impoverished neighborhood. By the mid-1960s, with social and economic changes in American life, such places were becoming insecure. It was the great achievement of the founding generation of our parish to purchase a property in Roslindale and to build our present church, where, praise be to God, our communal spiritual life has been going on since 1971. Our forebears showed remarkable devotion to the Church and ability to sacrifice on Her behalf. Their financial resources were in no way comparable to ours. Most of them toiled humbly in low paying jobs, and even those who came with to America with a higher education or illustrious background had to start from scratch. We owe everything we have to them. That is why I devoted the main part of my talk to them. I will end by briefly sketching the further development of our parish.
As we all know, the region around Boston has long been an important center of higher education and scholarship in the United States, and since the 1980s of high tech. Thanks to this, over the years our parish has had a continuous influx of people who come here to go to school, to teach or to find a job.
In the late 1960s and in the 1970s, people of non-Slavic background started coming to our church. Several families of Old Calendarist Greeks joined us. Americans started coming to church, and many of them later converted to Orthodoxy. Some of them were conservative Catholics who rejected the liberal reforms of the Second Vatican Council. Others came to our Church as a result of a broadly conceived search for the Truth. In the 1990s, most of these Orthodox Americans joined the newly established English-language Church of Blessed Xenia of St. Petersburg in Methuen. This church, which is currently thriving, might be thought of as the daughter or, perhaps more modestly (from our side), the sister of ours.
In the late 1970s, a very important change took place – after a break of more than 30 years, the flow of people out of the Soviet Union resumed. As part of a grand political game with the U.S. government, Soviet leadership began letting people who opposed to the Soviet system emigrate. Among the dissidents, as they were called, there existed a movement toward the Orthodox Church. Part of the Soviet intelligentsia of Jewish origin got caught up in this. When the Soviets began expelling dissidents and allowing Jews to leave, many of them ended up in Boston, and some became our parishioners. Overall, by the mid-1980s, when I began attending services, a very interesting and unique parish had come into being. One could meet here a White Guard officer wearing his St. George’s cross, and also the grandson of Jewish communist poet. But what was most impressive was the intensity of the religious life.
It goes without saying that the collapse of the Soviet Union had a profound effect on our parish. The revival of the Church in the former Soviet republics and the new freedom of movement enriched our life with a large influx of young and energetic parishioners. The human contact between the older waves of emigration and the new people from the former Soviet Union created the conditions in our parish for the joyful reception of the Reunification of 2007. Afterwards, all the generations of our parish took part in the big project of renovating and expanding our church. This was planned over the course of many years, but carried out in 2016-17. I could stop here, having sketched out the main stages of the growth of our parish, but recently we have witnessed a very encouraging thing: more and more young Americans have been coming to our church. It is wonderful to see how quickly they find common ground with their age cohorts who have grown up in our parish. Let us hope that this continues and that, with God’s help, our parish continues to thrive.
Leonid Heretz
6/19 January 2026
