The Antiochian Church arrived in America in 1895, when Syrian and Lebanese Orthodox immigrants established the first parish in New York City.
These weren’t the first Orthodox Christians in America. Russians had been here since the 1790s in Alaska. But the Antiochians came as part of the great wave of immigration from the Ottoman Empire in the late 1800s. They were fleeing persecution, looking for work, searching for a better life. And they brought their faith with them.
The story really begins with a doctor named Ibrahim Arbeely. He’d come from Damascus and settled in New York, where he watched Syrian Orthodox families arrive with no church, no priest, no way to baptize their children or bury their dead. In 1895, he helped form the Syrian Orthodox Benevolent Society and wrote to the Russian Orthodox bishop in San Francisco asking for help. The Russians had been caring for Orthodox immigrants of all backgrounds, and they agreed to send someone.
That someone was Archimandrite Raphael Hawaweeny.
Raphael was a scholar from Damascus who’d been teaching in Russia. He arrived in New York on November 17, 1895, and immediately started organizing the scattered Syrian families into a parish. They met at 77 Washington Street in lower Manhattan. By 1900, about 3,000 Syrian Orthodox had settled in the area, and the community shifted to Brooklyn.
In 1902, they bought a building at 301-303 Pacific Street and dedicated it as St. Nicholas Church. Two years later, on March 12, 1904, something happened there that had never happened before in North America. Raphael was consecrated as a bishop. The first Orthodox bishop ever consecrated on this continent.
Bishop Raphael didn’t stay put in Brooklyn. He traveled constantly, founding parishes from Massachusetts to Iowa, from Pennsylvania down to the Mexican border. He published a magazine called Al-Kalimat in 1905. He translated liturgical books into Arabic. He died in 1915, and we now know him as St. Raphael of Brooklyn, the patron saint of immigrants to North America.
After his death, things got complicated. The Russian Revolution in 1917 threw Russian Orthodoxy into chaos, and the Antiochian parishes in America found themselves without clear oversight. They turned directly to the Patriarchate of Antioch, but internal conflicts split them into two competing archdioceses. One was based in New York and loyal to Antioch. The other was in Toledo and had complicated ties to Russian jurisdiction.
This split lasted decades. It wasn’t until 1975 that the two finally reunited as the single Antiochian Orthodox Christian Archdiocese of North America, headquartered in Englewood, New Jersey. That’s the archdiocese we’re part of today.
What’s striking about this history is how it mirrors the experience of so many people in Southeast Texas. Families came here from somewhere else, brought their faith, built churches in new places. The Syrians in Brooklyn weren’t so different from the Cajuns who came to Beaumont or the oil workers who moved here from Louisiana and Oklahoma. You plant roots where you land.
The Antiochian presence in America has grown far beyond those early Syrian immigrants. We’ve welcomed converts from every background, established missions in small towns and big cities, built monasteries and seminaries. But it all started with a handful of families in New York who refused to let their children grow up without the Church, and with a bishop who wore himself out traveling to make sure they didn’t have to.
If you visit the Antiochian Village camp in Pennsylvania or attend the Archdiocese convention, you’ll meet people whose great-grandparents knew Bishop Raphael. You’ll also meet converts who found Orthodoxy last year. That’s what the Antiochian Church in America is now, a mix of heritage and mission, memory and growth. We’re still doing what those first immigrants did in 1895: trying to be Orthodox Christians right here, right now, in the place God has planted us.
