Bishop Daniel of Erie passed away on this day in 2010. The account below is an abbreviated text by John Hudanish. The full text came out in Orthodox America in 1988 and is available here. Bishop Daniel was born Dimitry Borisovich Alexandroff in the city of Odessa on the Black Sea. His father Boris had fought against the Bolsheviks in the Civil War immediately after the Revolution of 1917, but had elected to remain in Russia following the defeat of the White armies. The infamous purges began in the mid-1930’s and spread their venom throughout the suffering body of Mother Russia, touching every city, every village, every family. The Alexandroffs were not spared. Boris Alexandroff was considered an “enemy of the people”, and he was dismissed without cause from his post at Odessa Geophysical Observatory in 1937. Early in 1938, Boris found employment as a machinist at a factory in the industrial city of Zlatoust in the Ural mountains, but three NKVD agents came to their apartment on the evening of April 5, 1938, and took Boris away. His family never saw him again. In 1939, Elena resolved to take the children and return to Odessa. But as family members of an “enemy of the people,” they were not permitted to enter the city. Instead, they went to the Crimea and found refuge with distant relatives who were living at that time in Yalta. On June 22, 1941, Nazi Germany and its allies invaded the Soviet Union. Romanian divisions occupied Odessa and the Crimean peninsula. Romania was unencumbered by any notion of militant atheism in those days. And so in 1942, they allowed Elena Alexandroff and her children to return to Odessa. It was at this time that young Dimitry began in earnest to learn the services of the Orthodox Church, serving as a psalomshchik in his brother-in-law’s parish in Odessa. It was also during the Romanian occupation that Dimitry Alexandroff first became aware of the Old Believers. In 1943, he came upon a copy of The Life of Archpriest Avvakum by Himself. Father Avvakum’s struggle made a lasting impression on Dimitry and led him to read other accounts of the Old Ritualist schism. After two years’ respite from Soviet terror, Elena Alexandroff and her two sons decided to quit Russia with the retreating Romanian forces in 1944. One stormy evening shortly after they arrived in Romania, the Alexandroffs found shelter among a group of hardy Russian Old Believer peasants. Dimitry so impressed these Old Believers with his knowledge on liturgical matters that they offered Elena a pile of gold as tall as the lad himself if she would only let them keep him and put him in the way of becoming a priest. Whether or not they actually had the gold to make good on their offer, their notion seems strangely prophetic in retrospect. Elena and Dimitry arrived in the United States in 1949 and settled in southern New Jersey. Dimitry quickly learned English and graduated from the public high school in Vineland. At that time there was a scattering of Old Believer families in the area where Dimitry and his mother lived. Soon he was introduced to the noted Old Believer iconographer, Pimen Sofronov. Pimen found Dimitry’s ability with a brush good enough to use him as an artisan. For a time the two traveled together from parish to parish, beautifying and embellishing churches with images of Christ, His angels and His saints. From 1952 to 1956, Dimitry was a seminarian at Holy Trinity Seminary in Jordanville, New York. Among his classmates were Metropolitan Laurus and Archbishop Alipy. By the time he had completed his studies at Jordanville, Dimitry had resolved to make the Old Believers his life’s work. More than forty Old Believer families arrived in the United States from Turkey in 1963. Almost all of them settled in New Jersey and found employment in factories around Lakewood and Millville. Dimitry often visited them, and was concerned that they had no priests. He communicated this concern to the Synod of Bishops. In 1965, Metropolitan Philaret ordained him as a celibate priest to serve in the Old Rite, blessing him to work among the Old Believers in New Jersey and elsewhere. In 1967, a community of Old Believers in Canada invited him to become their bishop, on the condition of the lifting of the anathemas imposed on the Old Rite by the Moscow Councils of 1656 and 1667. Father Dimitry petitioned the Synod of Bishops to remove these anathemas, but this petition fizzled out. In March, 1974, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, was expelled from the Soviet Union. An opinion that he gave around this time about the Orthodox jurisdictions in Western world contained a highly publicized plea for reconciliation with the Old Believers . This caused Father Dimitry’s long-forgotten petition about removal of anathema to be resurrected. In September, 1974, the Synod of Bishop ratified a decree based on a draft by Father Dimitry. Earlier the same year the resolution about rescinding anathema was adopted by the Third Pan-Diaspora Council in Jordanville, NY. In 1982 a large community of Pomorotsy (a priestless Old Believer persuasion that permitted matrimony) in Erie, PA joined the ROCOR. In 1988, Fr. Daniel (Alexandroff) was tonsured a monk and became their bishop. Similarly to Archbishop Alipy of Chicago, Bishop Daniel was a Russian polymath, who designed two churches in Hartford, CT and Washington, DC, who could paint icons, translate from Greek and fire a canon. Although Bishop Daniel had his reservations regarding the reconciliation with Moscow Patriarchate, he passed away in the fold of the canonical Russian Church Abroad in 2010. |
