Last updated on Tuesday, July 15, 2003

The solitary man is Roger Horoshko, one of the earliest members of the congregation. Belarusian refugees fleeing the post-World War II Soviet occupation established the church in 1950. At that time, the Belarusian community rented a storefront on Ashford Street in East New York to hold services. A year later, the community moved the church to East 4th Street in Manhattan, where it held services with another Orthodox sect. Although the church did not have its own building then, it was so packed that the congregation spilled into the middle of the aisle from make-shift pews, as one or two of the black and white photographs pinned onto a standing board on the first floor show. In 1957, the church found its present home along Atlantic Avenue.

The small building, built in 1850 by an Episcopalian congregation,

has seen the reincarnation of a smorgasbord of faiths. The Episcopalian congregation sold the building to a Reformed Presbyterian community seven years later, who then sold it to a United Presbyterian community seven years after that. The United Presbyterian, in turn, sold the site to a Baptist congregation, who remained until 1957, when the Belarusian community bought the church building.

George Kosciukiewizz, who grew up with Horoshko in the Belarusian church on Atlantic Avenue, estimated that there were about 200 families who attended the church in the 1950s. Today, there are only 23 regular members, most of them in the choir.

Kosciukiewizz, who at 73 still sings in the choir, says, “People moved away to new places, to a better living. A lot of them moved far away in their old age, to places like Florida. I know friends who go and die there, where the houses are cheaper, and where the doctors are cheaper.”

However, those who have moved away have not forgotten the church. Many former church members still send regular checks to keep the church going. Still, the costs to preserve the church are mounting. The church plans to renovate the library and the archive rooms, where old newspapers are stored. In the chapel hall, trimmings of gold-leaf paper will be added to the edges of the mural partitions on the platform from which the priest conducts the services. Fortunately, labor costs are nil—the priest, 30-year-old Igor Yakunin, who has a day job working on construction projects, fixes up the church.

Besides trying to make ends meet for the church, members also face external threats, not to their existence per se, but to their legitimacy and independence. As the Belarusian church on Atlantic Avenue is the headquarter of 15 other similar self-governing orthodox parishes scattered in the United Kingdom, Australia and Canada, it has been the target of some rumors, according to Metropolitan Iziaslav, the patriarch of the exiled Belarusian community.
Iziaslav believes that the Russian Orthodox is attacking the legitimacy of the Belarusian church. “They say that this church is not canonical,” he says. According to Thomas Burd, professor of Slavic literatures for over 20 years at Queens College of the City University of New York, to be canonical, the priests and bishops of an Orthodox Church have to receive their orders from the Russian Orthodox Church.

Burd, who visits the church from time to time, confirmed the rumors, but defended the Belarusian church. “The Russian church has no right today to say that this church is not canonical. The rumors have nothing to do with theology. They are politically motivated by a sense of imperial nostalgia on the part of the Russian church, which resented the breaking away of Belarusian and Ukrainian churches with the breakup of the Soviet Union. The rumors are an attempt to isolate and marginalize the autonomous Belarusian and Ukrainian churches,” Burd says.

Both the older and the younger generations of the church are no strangers to resisting encroachment on their autonomy. The older generation experienced oppression under the Soviet occupation, and the younger, under the current dictatorship of Alexander Lukashenko, an admirer of Stalin who came into power in Belarus following rigged elections in 1994.

Yakunin and a few other men like him are new immigrants fleeing the oppressive regime at home. They are optimistic about the future of the church and anticipate that an influx of new immigrants like themselves fleeing the dictatorship will revive the church as it did in the 1950s. Older men like Kosciukiewizz have a more jaded perception. “Younger people get Americanized, and they just sort of break away,” he says. “With intermarriages, they also leave the church gradually.” Kosciukiewizz has a daughter who married a Californian of Spanish descent.

Although Valentinan Balashchenko cannot convince her daughter, who has to work on Sundays, to attend church with her, she brings her six-year-old grandson Serge Blazhko to church. “I want my grandson to grow up to be involved in the church,” Balashchenko says. Upon entering the scent-filled chapel with little Serge by her side, Balashchenko instructs her grandson in the practice of the faith by example. She picks up three yellow candles, lights them up and places them in a candleholder in front of a life-size wooden crucifix of Christ. During her silent prayers before the crucifix, she crosses herself a few times. Serge watches her attentively, and mimics his grandmother, crossing himself just as fervently as she does.