Orthodox Churches in New Jersey

According to a survey of each state's first Orthodox parishes, New Jersey's was a Russian parish in Garfield, founded in 1898. Carpatho-Russian immigrants began coming to America around 1885, and many settled in the industrial towns of southern Passaic and Bergen counties, working in textile mills and factories. In Passaic, a parish that Greek Catholic immigrants organized in 1902 joined the Russian Orthodox diocese in 1910.

Two of the earliest Ukrainian Orthodox parishes in the United States were in New Jersey, one now in Maplewood and one in Trenton; the Trenton parish was the first Ukrainian Orthodox parish in the country incorporated under state law. Ukrainian Orthodox cathedrals stand in Carteret and Clifton. A Greek Orthodox parish was founded in Perth Amboy in 1917, and the Greek Orthodox Metropolis of New Jersey is seated at the Metropolitan Cathedral of St. John the Theologian in Tenafly.

St. Alexander Nevsky Cathedral in Howell Township, of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia, traces its origins to settlers from Russia and Ukraine, many of them Cossacks, who fled revolution and civil war in the early twentieth century. A group of eighteen settlers founded a mission church in the 1930s, and the present cathedral was consecrated in 1997. In Passaic, the Russian cathedral's title, dating from 1957, is honorary, as the parish has never officially had a bishop in residence. Saints Peter and Paul Cathedral of the Orthodox Church in America is in Jersey City, and Saint George Macedonian Orthodox Monastery is in Randolph.