The Story of Mother Agapia, an American Nun Who has Devoted Her Life to the Holy Land and to Its Christian Communities
By Ambassador Patrick N. Theros - October 24, 2025
Notes and Comments on the Land Where Christ Lived, Died, and Was Resurrected
Most
Americans, even within our community, know little about the once-vast
Christian populations of the Near and Middle East – communities that
once outnumbered the Christians of Europe. Today they survive only as
scattered remnants, mostly single-digit minorities east of the
Mediterranean except in Lebanon; even there, the numbers dwindle. Among
the most endangered are the indigenous Palestinian Christians, whose
extinction now seems possible.
I recently spoke with Mother
Agapia, a Russian Orthodox nun – an American who has spent most of her
adult life in Jerusalem and the surrounding hills. Her voice carries
both serenity and sorrow: the calm of prayer layered over decades of
witnessing loss.
Born into a Greek Orthodox family in New Jersey,
she discovered the Russian Orthodox tradition while studying in
Michigan. She joined a small monastic community in Jordanville, NY, and
later received a blessing to go to Jerusalem. In 1996 she entered the
Convent of Saint Mary Magdalene on the Mount of Olives. “My first year
felt like heaven,” she told me. “Prayer, obedience, liturgy, and the
rhythm of bells.” The serenity of those early days did not last.
When
I asked about the Russian Church’s role in the Holy Land – a role
little known or understood in the United States – she responded with a
concise history. The Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Jerusalem is the
canonical guardian of all Christian holy sites. In the nineteenth
century the Russians, under Archimandrite Antonin Kapustin, bought
extensive lands and built the Church of Saint Alexander Nevsky near the
Holy Sepulchre. They functioned under the overall authority of the Greek
Orthodox Patriarchate, but their wealth and numbers brought Russian
influence as well. After the Russian Revolution, British-mandate
authorities placed these properties under the ‘White Russian’ Church
Outside Russia (ROCOR), cooperating with the Greek Patriarchate. When
Israel became a state in 1948, it transferred the properties within its
borders to the Moscow Patriarchate in gratitude for Stalin’s early
recognition of the new Jewish state. Only those in Jordanian-annexed
territory remained under the exiles. “We have always been part of
Jerusalem’s fabric,” she said, “but rarely in control of our own
thread.”
In 1998 Mother Agapia was assigned to administer a
girls’ school in Bethany – al-Azariya in Arabic – the village of
Lazarus, whom Christ raised from the dead. Founded in the 1940s for
Christian girls, it had by then become overwhelmingly Muslim. “We had
about three hundred students,” she said, “mostly Palestinian girls from
families just trying to live normal lives.” Her convent lay two miles
away, over the Mount of Olives. “The first abbess used to ride a donkey
to class,” she smiled. The school still taught, to all its students
scripture and languages beneath icons and crosses hung on every wall.
“No one ever objected,” she said. “In that time, we all still believed
peace was possible.”
The period after the Oslo Accords in 1993,
she remembered, felt almost hopeful. Palestinians and Israelis mingled
freely; the wall did not yet exist. “People talked about peace,” she
said. “Palestinians worked in West Jerusalem, and Israelis drove to
Jericho on weekends for cheaper produce. You could imagine a future.”
She remembers Elder Theodosios Makkos, a Greek priest revered by Muslim
neighbors for saving young King Hussein during an assassination attempt
decades earlier. “He was everyone’s hero,” she said. “We were respected
because we respected them.”
Then came 2000. “Everything changed
when Ariel Sharon went up to the Temple Mount,” she recalled. The Second
Intifada erupted. Bethany lay in Area B – an area with no Palestinian
police, no fire service, only a powerless local mayor. “They
jack-hammered the road to Ramallah. Teachers couldn’t reach the school;
some slept in classrooms. At three in the morning jeeps came through
shouting for everyone to stay indoors.” She paused. “You realize it
doesn’t take many soldiers to control twenty thousand people if you keep
them afraid.” Classes, prayers, even movement between convent and
school became acts of courage. “Fear replaced prayer,” she said, “and
faith became endurance.”
Not all her stories are grim. She spoke
warmly of the quiet Russian-speaking Israelis who fill the convent
chapel on Saturdays. “Many of them came under the Law of Return granting
refuge to anyone who had one Jewish great-grandparent – and often an
Orthodox mother still lights candles. They come quietly, whispering
Slavonic hymns. They are Israeli by passport, Russian by culture,
Orthodox by heart.” Their presence, she said, unsettles Israel’s tidy
sense of religious identity. “They worship in silence, because their
faith doesn’t fit the categories.”
When I asked about Western
Christians, her tone sharpened. “American Christian Zionists,” she
sighed, “love Israel but forget the Church that Christ left behind.” She
spoke of pilgrims who disdain the Holy Sepulchre to pray instead at the
‘Garden Tomb’, a nineteenth-century invention that flatters their
theology. “They support Israel politically,” she said, “but they don’t
see the people who keep the lamps burning at Christ’s tomb. One day
they’ll find the churches still standing – but empty.”
Over her
twenty-five years in Jerusalem, Agapia has watched the city turn from
pluralism to piety enforced. “Tel Aviv still feels European,” she said,
“but Jerusalem belongs to the rabbis now.” Bus lines separate men from
women; streets close on the Sabbath. “The politicians who were once on
the fringe now run the country. Jerusalem used to breathe. Now it
tightens.” Yet despite also being themselves victims of the
ultra-religious, secular Israelis “just look away when Christians are
harassed.”
Each return brings new shock. Apartments that once
housed Christian or Muslim families now fly Israeli flags. “A Jewish
family moves in, and soldiers guard the door,” she said. The
intimidation feels both visible and legal. Around Jaffa Gate, church
lands are under perpetual litigation. In Silwan, rebranded as the City
of David, Palestinian homes are bought or seized one by one, funded by
wealthy Americans like Irving Moskowitz and Sheldon Adelson, and by
organizations such as Ateret Cohanim, which registers in the United
States as a 501(c)(3) charity devoted to “redeeming Jerusalem.” “They
call it redemption,” she said quietly, “but they mean replacement.”
Beyond
the walls, the landscape itself testifies. When she first came to
Bethany, Ma’ale Adumim was a small hilltop settlement; now it sprawls
like a city. Four-lane highways carve through what were once open
hillsides. “They call it development,” she said, “but it’s conquest by
paperwork.”
Her voice softened when we spoke of numbers. “In 1948
Christians were ten percent of the population. Now, maybe two.” Israeli
officials blame Muslim hostility or migration, but she sees exhaustion –
families trapped between bureaucracy and hopelessness. “You can measure
the decline in baptisms, in marriages, in courage.” Pilgrimage money
once kept monasteries alive; now it barely keeps lights on. “It isn’t
persecution in the old sense,” she said. “It’s erosion – a steady
wearing away.”
She described the separation wall as “the scar
across the Holy Land.” From her convent she can see it winding like a
gray serpent through olive groves, looping around aquifers and farmland.
“It doesn’t trace a border,” she said, “it cuts through families.” What
once was a ten-minute walk between Bethlehem and Ramallah is now an
hour’s drive through checkpoints. “We used to carry icons and bread to
each other’s homes,” she said. “Now we carry ID papers.” Even
Palestinian citizens of Israel are warned not to cross. She told of a
Greek-American scholar who studied at Hebrew University for years but
never dared visit Bethlehem because he was told it was dangerous. When
he finally did – in Mother Agapia’s company – he wept as locals greeted
him in Greek. “That’s what the wall does,” she said. “It divides souls
as much as land.”
In the end her story returns to faith. “We are
not relics,” she insists. “We are the descendants of the first
believers.” She remembers a gathering of young Christians near Jacob’s
Well. One spoke of leaving to study medicine abroad; the others urged
him to stay. “They know what they’re losing if they go,” she said. Some
who study in Greece or Cyprus come home determined to serve as priests.
“But the pressures – economic, political, psychological – are immense.”
Most
Christians in America, she adds, have no idea such communities still
exist. “They think we’re talking about ruins, not people.” Her warning
is gentle but chilling: if the world remains indifferent, the Holy Land
will become a museum of Christianity – its altars polished, its churches
restored, but its believers gone. “The stones will outlast us,” she
said, “but without the people who pray among them, they’ll have nothing
left to echo.”