Orthodox Churches in New York

By 1895 the Orthodox community of New York City included mainly Russian, Greek, Romanian and Arab immigrants. Holy Trinity, founded in 1891, was the first Greek Orthodox church in the city. After Fr. Nicholas Bjerring's chapel closed in 1883, the city had no Russian Orthodox place of worship until the Russian Mission founded St. Nicholas Church in April 1895. That November Archimandrite Raphael Hawaweeny arrived to serve Arabic-speaking Orthodox Christians, and in 1904 he became Bishop of Brooklyn and the first Orthodox bishop consecrated in North America.

In Manhattan, Holy Trinity has stood on East 74th Street since 1932 and has been the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America's cathedral since 1962. St. Nicholas Russian Orthodox Cathedral on East 97th Street, completed in 1902, is the administrative center of the Russian Orthodox Patriarchal Parishes in the USA. In Brooklyn, St. Nicholas Antiochian Orthodox Cathedral, which became Raphael's cathedral, keeps a shrine to him; the Orthodox Church in America glorified him as a saint in 2000.

Outside New York City, parishes of several jurisdictions serve Albany, Binghamton, Buffalo, Rochester and Syracuse, among other cities. Monastic communities include the Novo-Diveevo convent in Nanuet and New Skete in Cambridge. New Skete comprises a men's monastery founded in 1966 and a women's monastery founded in 1969, both under the Metropolitan of the Orthodox Church in America. The monks are known for breeding German Shepherds, and both communities have revised the divine office and liturgies to make services more comprehensible.