Holy Trinity Monastery (Jordanville, New York)
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Holy Trinity Monastery is a male monastic community in Jordanville, New York. It is under the auspices of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia. The monastery is dedicated to the Holy Trinity, and its patronal feast day is Pentecost.
In 1928, two monks from St. Tikhon's Orthodox Monastery in South Canaan, Pennsylvania, in search of greater seclusion, purchased a small farm near Jordanville, in Herkimer County, New York. With the help of four new brothers, including bishop Vitaly, a house with a chapel was completed in 1935 and the tiny brotherhood was ready to move in. However, towards the conclusion of the dedication ceremonies a fire suddenly broken out on the second floor of the new house, and the building with all of its contents burnt to the ground. The small brotherhood struggled along for some years.
After World War II, when Czechoslovakia became an atheistic communist state, the St. Job of Pochaev Brotherhood, which has been in exile there after being forced to flee from its original location in the western Ukraine with the outbreak of the Bolshevik revolution in 1917, had to again relocate. After a brief stay in Munich, the Brotherhood accepted the invitation of Bishop Vitaly to join the struggling Brotherhood at Jordanville, resulting in the largest Orthodox Monastery in America. The Brotherhood of St. Job brought St. Job’s printing press with them across the Atlantic, and, until the fall of the Soviet Union, Holy Trinity Monastery was the only place in the world that could typeset in Old Church Slavonic. Today, it holds the distinction of the only place in the world that prints in Russian using the pre-1918 Old Orthography (see Reforms of Russian orthography). Although the Printshop of St. Job of Pochaev now uses modern, computerized typesetting, St. Job’s printing press is kept as a relic in the Print Shop.
The present Cathedral of the Holy Trinity was completed in 1951; the Governor of New York, Thomas E. Dewey attended the dedication.
The monastery also houses the Holy Trinity Orthodox Seminary.
