The Unspoken Fissure Between New York City’s Ukrainian and Russian Orthodox Churches

In the two and a half years since Russia invaded Ukraine, the Ukrainian Cathedral of St. Volodymyr on the Upper West Side has organized multiple fundraisers for Ukrainian immigrants fleeing the war. Meanwhile, St. Nicholas—the Russian Orthodox cathedral on the Upper East Side—has maintained a “no stance” stance toward the war abroad.

By Carolyn Gevinski

A candlelit St. Nicholas Cathedral during Sunday liturgy on Upper East Side, NY (2023)

There are no benches or pews in St. Nicholas Russian Orthodox Cathedral on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. Standing is the traditional posture of etiquette in Russian Orthodoxy and so, during a Sunday liturgy, the parishioners stood before their God himself. A choir caroled to the churchgoers under signature Russian Orthodox crosses with three horizontal beams. The dimly lit cathedral subsumed bands of women dressed in flowing skirts down to their ankles and scarves to cover their hair.

“For as many times as people hurt us, we are hurting other people. If we go through life thinking we aren’t hurting other people, we are,” echoed Father John Schieffler, his voice reverberating around the onion dome—a characteristic feature of Russian Orthodox churches across the world. The arched rooftop is painted with the Virgin Mary (known as Theotokos in Russian Orthodoxy) and her child. Her celestial presence loomed over her believers.

In the years since the onslaught in Ukraine, the cathedral has seen a growing rift in its internal membership, according to head Priest Schieffler.

“Some people have left us because of it. Not many, but some, mainly those of Ukrainian origin,” he explained. He believes they may be attending a Ukrainian Orthodox church across the park on the West Side, but has high hopes for their return. “I suspect once it's all over, people will start to come back,” he said.

In New York City, more than 4,500 miles from both Moscow and Kyiv, the war is playing out across either side of Central Park, where two churches who were once brotherly are now turning against each other.

When asked about the church’s stance on the war, Schieffler had a matter-of-fact reply: St. Nicholas follows the word of the Moscow Patriarchate, the governing entity of the Russian Orthodox Church.

A branch of Ukraine’s Orthodox Church formally announced its split from that same Patriarchate in May 2022 over the country’s invasion of Ukraine. This followed a 2019 schism between the two which formed after Ukraine was given permission by the spiritual leader of Orthodox Christians around the globe to form its own church, ending centuries of ties between the two countries.

Since then, the tenor of dialogue between leaders of the two global churches has become increasingly hostile.

The World Russian People’s Council, which is a Russian forum led by Kirill approved a weighted document on March 27, 2024 entitled “The Present and Future of the Russian World” This document called the onslaught in Ukraine a “liberation struggle of the Russian people,” and a “holy war in which Russia and its people, defending the unified spiritual space of the Holy Rus, fulfills the mission of the ‘Holder’, protecting the world from the onslaught of globalism and the victory of the West that has fallen into Satanism.”

The document called Russia the “creator, and protector of the Russian World,” denying religious, ethnic, and ideological differences within slavic region.

Just as Kirill’s messaging ignored the distinctions between former soviet satellites, Schieffler in New York has maintained that the Russian Orthodox Church, which he sees as a representation of the patriarch of Moscow and not an American group, is a pan-Slavic community. “But within that, you have churches that have—not separated, because we’re all in communion—but churches that have sort of built their own communities sensitive to their particular regional cultural differences,” he said. He cited the Ukrainian Orthodox church on the West Side as well as Romanian Orthodox and Georgian Orthodox traditions.

“We’re more the Mother church of all of them, in terms of history,” he said. “Russian Orthodoxy is entrenched in what used to be known as the old Russian Empire which stretched from Alaska all the way into the Balkans.” Within the Russian Orthodox church, the opinion is that the religion still has a larger stronghold than its modern geographic area.

The rhetoric that Russia is the linguistic, religious, cultural mother of the pan-Slavic world is a message that has been repeatedly expressed by Putin, both before Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine and as a justification for the incursion.

“In Ukraine, they are working to outlaw the canonical Orthodox Church and to deepen the schism,” Putin said a year ago when he met with Kirill and other religious leaders in Moscow. Expanding to ethnic and sectarian strife around the world, he continued: “These actions are clearly designed to sow instability around the world, to divide cultures, peoples and world religions, and to provoke a clash of civilisations.”

The message in Schieffler’s sermon came from the gospel reading for that day: “We must love our neighbor as ourselves. People struggle with that. They forget that if you’re not loving the neighbor, you’re not loving God,” said Shieffler.

Last week, Russia freed wrongly-convicted Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich in exchange for Russians what The Wall Street Journal referred to as the “largest and most complex East-West prisoner swap since the Cold War.” Gershkovich and more than a dozen others imprisoned in Russia were exchanged for Russian assassin Vadim Krasikov and others held in the U.S. and Europe.

In welcoming home Krasikov, Putin congratulated the assassin on “returning to the Motherland,” furthering the idea of the “Mother Rus.”

Back in New York City, while Schieffler holds the opinion that the slavic world is, at least religiously, in communion, the Ukrainian Orthodox Church views itself as an independent entity.

The Ukrainian Orthodox Church is a separate entity from Russian Orthodoxy, Fessak said. This belief aligns with the Ukrainian government’s wider conviction that Putin is attempting to rewrite history through the dissemination of propaganda.

“We’re a Ukrainian-speaking parish, so we have very few Russian parishioners or attendees,” said Andrew Fessak, President of the Board of Trustees at the Ukrainian Orthodox Cathedral of Saint Volodymyr on the Upper West Side.

“In the United States, the Orthodox churches tend to be very divided on nationalistic lines.” He explained how there are Russian Orthodox Churches, Ukrainian Orthodox Churches, Bulgarian Orthodox Churches, Greek Orthodox Churches. “You’re not usually going to see many parishioners or attendees from a different ethnicity,” he said.

For its part, the Ukrainian Orthodox Cathedral in New York has held extensive fundraisers for both Ukrainians living in Ukraine, and refugees in the United States. Parishioners with family in Ukraine have been coping through whatever means possible, according to Fessak. “Everybody does the best they can,” he said. “Everybody has relatives back in Ukraine, so we’re all very conscious and very sympathetic to the Ukrainian cause.”

“Since day one, the church was deeply involved with helping the Ukrainian people,” said Maryna Gladyschuk, a member of St. Volodymyr and real estate agent in Brooklyn. In addition to the plethora of fundraisers that the church has held to provide medical care for Ukrainian refugees in the United States and raise money for protective clothing and shoes for military forces and civilians in Ukraine, Gladyschuk illustrated her community’s fervent determination to send donations abroad, even when there isn’t an upcoming event.

“It’s coats, it’s whatever clothes they have. People don’t use them, so they bring them to the church,” said Gladyschuk. “The priest basically has no time to sleep because there are always calls.”

St. Volodymyr started organizing drives to provide medical care for Ukrainian refugees in February 2023 and has continued with frequent grassroots-style organization in the year since. Refugees could apply for these events with their Medicaid numbers. Doctors who were willing to work overtime or donate their schedule volunteered to check vital signs and provide services that one would usually receive at a regular checkup.

“They gave us as much room as we needed,” said Dr. Shawn Yunayev, Medical Director and founder of the Trans-Atlantic Medical Relief Foundation, which organized multiple medical drives in 2023 in conjunction with St. Volodymyr. “We really tried to kind of reinvent it [the church hall]. So it almost kind of looked like a mini hospital. There was an area for triage, an area for consultation, for the examinations, ancillary services like EKG and ultrasound, and we had some rapid tests.”

Displaced Ukrainian patients were able to test for HIV, the flu, and COVID at the pop-up medical drive. The medical team even identified an abnormal heart condition in one patient, who was able to schedule a follow-up with a cardiologist, Yunayev explained, underscoring the life-saving work that transpired at St. Volodymyr.

“If you're going to do charity work, then make sure it's effective,” said the Brooklyn-based physician. “Even if you're able to impact one life, then it's all worth it.”

Yunayev’s commitment to providing medical assistance for refugees stems from his Ukrainian lineage. He was born in the city of Enakievo (also called Yenakiieve), but emigrated to the United States when he was just a few months old.

“I’m Ukrainian by birth, but we left the country,” Yunayev broke down his family history.

“I've always found it interesting as far as its willingness to want to do better,” said the physician, expounding upon his professional interest in Ukrainian medicine. “The health care sector is looking to modernize and westernize, but it's almost as if, even prior to the war, they've been held back by corruption, or Russia sitting on their shoulders, or a combination of different things.”

At the end of July 2024, St. Volodymyr joined fundraising forces with Ukraine Solutions, a nonprofit based in Richmond, Virginia, to provide emergency medical devices including defibrillators to Ukrainian soldiers on the front lines.

St. Nicholas Cathedral, for its part, has not held any fundraisers in support of Ukraine or displaced Ukrainian refugees in New York City.

For other families at St. Nicholas, on the other hand, the church that they were raised in now elicits internal confusion. Schieffler's co-priest, Father Mark Rashkov, laid out a bit of his own family history to explain his disorientation. His grandmother and relatives originated from Odesa. After World War Two, they ended up in Moscow through Uzbekistan. From the Soviet Union, they came to the United States, where Mark grew up, in Brooklyn. His father's side is Russian—his mother’s side came from Ukraine. It left him confused.

“I felt connected to Russia, to Ukraine, to Uzbekistan, to Russian Orthodox, ” Rashkov explained.

Veronica Kaninska, a parishioner at St. Nicholas contended that there are still Ukrainians who attend St. Nicholas, despite the church’s backing of Moscow Patriarch Kirill. “You don’t cut your hand and arm because someone tells you to,” said Kaninska, who studied at the National Music Academy in Ukraine and is now an Assistant Teaching Professor at St. Joseph University in New York City. “It has become a part of my identity.”

Blood, water, or a mixture, the relationship between the two estranged churches is undeniably complex—even here, in New York City. Rashkov, Schieffler’s co-priest, communicated his own anti-political stance. “They’re [parishioners] not drawn to a regime. They’re not drawn to politics,” he said. “They’re drawn to a very rich, ancient liturgical practice that is beautiful and intricate.”

“Some people believe that if you don’t take a side, you’re being passive or dismissive,” said Rashkov. The priest described an analogous period during the Russo-Georgian war in 2008. At the time, St. Nicholas had a small Georgian following, some of whom departed the congregation when the church refused to put out a firm stance on the conflict. “We find that as far as the church is concerned, war, fighting, and aggression in any form is not something that we support. That’s how we were able to keep many Georgians then, and that's how we are still able to keep many Ukrainian families today.”

But for the Ukrainian Church on the Upper West Side, religion and matters of state go hand in hand. “I don’t see much difference between church politics and regular politics in any Westernized country,” Andrew Fessak said with an air of finality.

Carolyn Gevinski is a co-founder and co-editor-in-chief at Grassroots. She can be reached at carolyn@grassrootsmagazinenyc.com