Orthodox Churches in Erie, Pennsylvania

Priestless Russian Old Believers, drawn by work on the bayfront ore and pulp docks, chartered the parish of the Church of the Nativity in 1916 and dedicated a church in 1919. Greek immigrants organized the Assumption parish in June 1918 and in 1929 bought a former synagogue on West 8th Street. St. Nicholas, on East Avenue on Erie's east side, was founded in 1938; many founders were immigrants from eastern Europe and Ukraine, and it belongs to the American Carpatho-Russian Orthodox Diocese.

After fire destroyed its West 8th Street church in 1985, Assumption opened a basilica-style church overlooking Lake Erie in 1988. In 1983 about 80 percent of the Nativity parish voted to join the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia, which in 1988 consecrated a Bishop of Erie and the Old Rite. By the early 2000s an estimated third of Nativity parishioners were adult converts. Holy Trinity, on Holland Street, is a priestless Old Believer church with services in Slavonic.