THE LATE
ARCHBISHOP ALEXANDER NEMOLOVSKY

ASSISTANT OF THE ARCHDIOCESE OF THE RUSSIAN ORTHODOX PARISHES IN WESTERN EUROPE

BIOGRAPHY :

The late Archbishop Alexander Nemolovsky (in the world Alexander Alexandrovich Nemolovsky) was born in the Volhynia Eparchy on August 30, 1876.  He was educated in the local parochial schools before entering the St. Petersburg Theological Seminary. He was ordained a deacon (celibate) on November 18, 1901, and then a week later he was ordained a priest.  Fr. Alexander then traveled to the United States where he was assigned to the parish at Catasaqua, Pennsylvania.  In turn he served in Reading, Pennsylvania (1906-1908) and Ss. Peter and Paul Church in Jersey City, New Jersey (1908-1909) where he worked actively with the Russian Immigrants House in New York City, aiding immigrants and editing the daily Russian-language paper Russian Immigrant. He also was editor of Svit between 1905 to 1909. In 1909, he was elected to be the first vicar bishop of the North American Archdiocese by the Holy Synod of the Russian Church.  In Russia, Alexander was tonsured on November 9, 1909, and then consecrated Bishop of Sitka (Alaska) at the St. Alexander Nevsky Monastery in St. Petersburg.  Returning to the United States he traveled extensively through his new diocese, reporting on the developments there in the Russian American Orthodox Messenger.  When Archbishop Platon left the diocese before the arrival of Archbishop Evdokim, he was named the temporary administrator of the North American archdiocese from July 1914 to March 1915. After the arrival of Evdokim, he was transferred in 1916 to Winnipeg, Canada as Bishop of Canada where his efforts were impaired by the activity of Protestant activists. Then, again in 1917 he was called to be administrator of the Archdiocese when Archbishop Evdokim left for Russia. Leaving Archimandrite Adam Philipovsky to administer the Canadian diocese, Bishop Alexander moved to New York as the fall out of the Bolshevik revolution descended on him and the North American diocese.  When it was announced that Archbishop Evdokim was not returning to the United States, the Second All-American Sobor of 1919 in Cleveland, Ohio elected Alexander as the ruling bishop which was confirmed by the Church of Russia on August 27, 1920. Alexander became overwhelmed by the loss of funding from Russia that added to the financial chaos he had inherited, including a debt of $100,000 from Archbishop Evdokim. After attempts to raise money locally failed, Bishop Alexander began to resort to mortgaging Church property. This only aggravated the problems.  His financial problems also provided cause for his enemies, particularly Fr. John Kedrovsky and the dissident priests supporting him who were attempting to usurp control of the diocese in line with the Bolshevik manifesto. Bishop Alexander's lack of understanding of economic and financial matters only aggravated the situation. Additionally, the element of factionalism began to grow in Canada where the immigrants began to split into Russian and Ukrainian factions.  Alexander took a strong nationalistic position and did not support his administrator Archimandrite Adam in pursuing the idea of an Ukrainian administration as had been done for Albanians and Serbians.  As a result the problem remained, eventually to result in a separate Ukrainian Orthodox church.
 In 1921, Bishop Alexander participated along with Platon in the ROCOR synod in Karlovtsy, Serbia, where he was confirmed as the primate of the Russian Metropolia in North America. As financial and factional complications grew, Bishop Alexander decided that it was best for the church that he leave the United States.  With the return of Metropolitan Platon to the United States, Bishop Alexander sent a letter on June 7, 1922, to Platon asking that he assume the duties of the ruling hierarch.  He then departed from the United States on June 20, 1922, finding himself on Mount Athos for a time and then eventually under Metropolitan Evlogi (Georgievsky), who had broken from the ROCOR and brought his Russian parishes in Western Europe under the Ecumenical Patriarchate.  Alexander served from 1929 until 1960 as Archbishop of Brussels and Belgium, first in the jurisdiction of the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople (the Russian Orthodox Exarchate in Western Europe) until 1946, and then moved to the Moscow Patriarchate until his death on April 11, 1960.