A Russian church's Via Dolorosa
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Last update - 01:45 24/12/2004
Alexander Nevsky Church, one of the more impressive assets of the Russian Church in East Jerusalem, is desolate. An elderly Russian princess who lives alone in the building is raising funds to preserve it
By Danny Rubinstein
At the end of Bab Khan al-Zeit, the central market of the Old City of Jerusalem, which proceeds southward from the Damascus Gate, stands one of the city's most impressive buildings, Alexander Nevsky Church. The Russian church and hostel is named for the 13th-century national hero and saint, who repulsed the Swedish invasion in a battle on the Neva River (which runs through St. Petersburg) and thereby stopped the spread eastward of German Catholicism.
This important church, which contains impressive archaeological finds, has been desolate for some years. Patches of plaster from the high ceiling fell, posing a hazard for visitors. Accordingly, the authorities classified the building as hazardous and closed it down.
In the past year a tall, fine-looking elderly woman has lived alone in the vast building. Her full name is Margarita Rida Dovrovskaya von Luelsdorf, but the Arab shop owners around the church call her "Rita." She was born in China to a family of Russian princes who originate from Saxony, in Germany. These days she is busy raising funds to repair and preserve the church. One of the obstacles she faces is the dispute over the assets of the Russian Church in the Holy Land.
The site, which abuts the Church of the Holy Sepulcher on the eastern side, and is thus at the end of the Via Dolorosa, was purchased in 1859 by the Russian consul in Jerusalem from the Coptic Church. The purpose was to build a hostel for pilgrims in the city and to house the Russian consulate. In the course of the work that began that year to remove refuse and dirt from the site, the remnants of an ancient structure were discovered, which had been constructed with huge stones - like the Herodian ones used in building the walls of the Temple Mount. The work was halted, and the Russians decided to build the hostel and the consulate at the site known as the Russian Compound, today located in West Jerusalem, not far from the Old City. In the 1860s archaeological excavations conducted at the site turned up exciting finds. In addition to a Roman "victory arch," the excavators found the threshold of a gate built in the ancient wall of Jerusalem. The hypothesis was that this was the gate through which Jesus left the boundaries of the city to be crucified on Golgotha (which is located on the other side of the wall of Alexander Nevsky Church, inside the Church of the Holy Sepulcher).
Archaeologist Prof. Dan Bahat, writing in the journal Ariel, notes that most scholars today do not accept the connection of the gate to the city wall and to the crucifixion of Jesus. It is possible that the impressive finds are remnants of the forum of the Emperor Hadrian and of the Temple of Aphrodite that existed in the second century C.E. The dimensions of the stones and the character of the construction definitely resemble the Herodian style of building on the Temple Mount, meaning that this was probably a secondary use of the stones from there, which were strewn in massive quantities in and around the city following the destruction of Jerusalem and the temple by the Romans.
Be that as it may, the pillars, the reconstructed arch, the stones used for the walls and the staircase inside Alexander Nevsky Church are among the most magnificent remnants of ancient Jerusalem. There is no doubt that the stones were also used to build part of the famous Roman Cardo (the central avenue), parts of which have been reconstructed in the more southern section of the market, in the Jewish Quarter of the Old City.
Special connections are needed before Princess Rita Dovrovsky will allow you to enter the Nevsky structure. More than 100 years ago, the Russian Orthodox Imperial Society built a kind of museum on the other side of the entry corridor to house the superb ancient objects that were found at the site, especially the holy threshold of the gate through which, a few scholars say, Jesus passed on his last way.
Time seems to have stopped in the church since July 17, 1918, when, by order of the revolutionaries in the Urals, Czar Nikolai II and his wife, Empress Alexandra Fiodorovna, were executed by gunshot. In addition to the icons and the paintings of saints that hang on the church walls, the rooms leading to the museum have pictures of the family that ruled Russia on the eve of the revolution - the czar, his wife, their daughters and their hemophiliac son Prince Alexei.
The wandering princess
Princess Rita's grandfather was a medical officer in the army of Czar Nikolai who died in the Russo-Japanese War of 1903. Her father was a 16-year-old boy at the time of the communist revolution and fled with the supporters of the old regime to the Xinjiang region on the border with China. It was there that Rita was born, in 1935. During her infancy the region came under Soviet influence, and her father and other relatives were arrested and murdered. Rita, her mother and her younger sister were incarcerated in the district capital, Urumqi, for 12 years; after their release they moved to Shanghai. When Mao Zedong came to power in China they fled again, this time to the Philippines.
After spending three years there, they went on to Australia. After three years there, as stateless refugees without passports, they made their way to India and then to Dakar and Senegal, in Africa, from there to Italy and then to various South American countries. For many years they could not find a place of their own, until finally Rita arrived in Washington, D.C., and then brought her mother and her sister to the city. In 1966 she married a German linguist who taught in the United States, and they had a daughter and a son. Eventually the marriage broke up and he returned to Germany.
As a pious member of the Russian Orthodox Church, Rita began to deal with the church's affairs. She first visited Jerusalem in 1993, where she met Archimandrite Anthony Grava, who at the time played key roles in the institutions of the Russian Church in Jerusalem. Grava was then at loggerheads with the leadership of the "Russian Orthodox Church outside of Russia." The dispute reached the courts and went to mediation, and Grava declared that in church matters he accepted the authority of the Greek Orthodox patriarch of Jerusalem - thus effectively denying the authority of the Russian Church. Grava fell ill a few years ago and left Israel. Since then a fierce political struggle has developed around the assets of the Russian Church in Jerusalem, including the magnificent Alexander Nevsky Church.
This strife is not taking place in a historical vacuum. Since the middle of the 19th century, the Russian Church has had vast holdings in the Holy Land in general and in Jerusalem in particular. The properties include land, buildings, churches and monasteries in Jaffa, on Mount Carmel, on the shores of the Sea of Galilee, in Ein Kerem (the Jerusalem neighborhood believed to have been the birthplace of John the Baptist), Hebron, Jericho and, of course, Jerusalem. The Jerusalem properties include the Russian Compound, Gethsemane and a large church compound on the Mount of Olives. The Russian Church also ran schools and inns in Nazareth, Beit Jalla and in a few villages in the Galilee. Imperial Russia used these institutions to strengthen its influence in the declining Ottoman Empire, and they were at the disposal of thousands of Russian pilgrims.
All this activity came to an abrupt end in the wake of the Russian Revolution in 1917. The pilgrims stopped coming. The Russian Orthodox Church split in two: the "Red Church," which continued to operate in Russia under the aegis of the communist regime, and the "White Church," of the Russian emigres in the West, who established their own religious institutions outside of Russia. Some of the large property holdings of the Russian Church in Palestine became run down. Some of them were seized by the British Mandate authorities, who recognized the White Church as the owner of the Russian assets in the Holy Land.
Another turning point occurred in 1948. The nascent State of Israel, which was assisted by the Soviet Union, decided to overturn British Mandate policy in this realm. The Israeli authorities expelled the officials of the White Church and announced that henceforth ownership of the assets in Israeli territory was in the hands of the Red Church in Moscow. The largest and most important property of the Russians in Israel was the Russian Compound in Jerusalem, where most of the buildings were placed in the service of state institutions. The kingdom of Jordan, in contrast, continued to recognize the White Church and its ownership of the important assets of the church in East Jerusalem.
Yet another turning point occurred in 1967, when the Israeli army conquered the West Bank and Israel annexed East Jerusalem. Israel did not change the status of the White Russian Church as the owner of the assets in the occupied territories, with the result that the government found itself recognizing both rival Russian churches, the Red and the White. The creation of the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, in 1994, again changed the situation, on top of which the Soviet Union had collapsed, so that on the face of it, there was no longer place for the two Russian churches.
Tangling with a nun
In 1997 the Moscow-based "Red" Russian patriarch, Alexei II, visited Israel and wanted to see the holdings of the Russian Church. He coordinated the visit with his New York-based colleagues and rivals from the White Church. The patriarch found himself at the center of an embarrassing incident during his visit to the Church of the Ascension, on the Mount of Olives. The "White" nuns shut the gate and denied him access. He and his staff were enraged and contacted then-prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. Nothing helped, and the patriarch left the site shamefacedly. However, Yasser Arafat presented the Moscow patriarch with a handsome present, when Palestinian security men chased away the two White nuns from the small church at the site of "Abraham's oak" at Hebron and transferred the place to Red monks. Arafat's political interest was clear. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the White Church no longer had the backing of the U.S. and the West and was weakened. At the same time, the Red Church in Moscow was poised possibly to regain its former status under the new Russian regime.
Another embarrassing incident occurred in January 2000, at the site of the White Russian Church in Jericho. Again Alexei II was visiting the Holy Land - this time accompanied by the former president of Russia, Boris Yeltsin. Arafat had promised the patriarch that he would transfer to him the church of the Whites in Jericho. On the morning of January 15, Palestinian security men pulled up by the church in Jericho in two Jeeps and ordered the few priests and nuns at the site to leave. A Russian-speaking Palestinian officer told them: "There are no longer two Churches, only one - that of Moscow."
Unfortunately for Arafat, one of the White nuns in Jericho was Anastasia Stephanopoulos, the sister of George Stephanopoulos, the adviser and close friend of U.S. president Bill Clinton. She called her brother, and within a few hours American diplomats in Israel were sent to deal with the matter urgently. In a short time the church in Jericho was returned to the Whites. Since then the structures in Jericho have been divided: half for the Whites and half for the Reds.
What will be the fate of the assets of the White Church in Jerusalem? That depends in part on the outcome of the disputes now raging within the Church. The splendid Alexander Nevsky Church is now under the protection of the Orthodox Society for the Holy Land, which is based in New York and on behalf of which Princess Rita is working in the Old City of Jerusalem. If she is unsuccessful in her fundraising efforts, the building, with all its treasures, will remain closed to the public and continue to decay.