Alexander Alexandrovich Hotovitzky was born on February 11, 1872, in Kremenets, Volhynia, into the family of the rector of the Volhynia Theological Seminary. He graduated from the St. Petersburg Theological Academy with a Master's degree in 1895, where he formed a lifelong friendship with John Kochurov, who would become the first priest-martyr of the Bolshevik Revolution. Both men boarded the same ship for America, their lives tracing parallel arcs of missionary zeal and martyrdom.
Arriving in New York in October 1895, Hotovitzky spent eighteen years building the institutional foundations of Orthodox Christianity in America. He was ordained to the priesthood on February 25, 1896, and returned to New York as rector of St. Nicholas Church. Over the next decade and a half, he led the construction of St. Nicholas Cathedral on East 97th Street in Manhattan, raising 80,000 rubles from donors on two continents, including Tsar Nicholas II and St. John of Kronstadt. The cornerstone was laid on May 22, 1901, before Russian Ambassador Count Cassini and Mayor Seth Low of New York. The cathedral, designed by architect John Bergesen in the Moscow Baroque style, was consecrated on November 23, 1902, before 2,000 worshippers.
During these same years, Hotovitzky edited the Russian Orthodox American Messenger for eighteen years, led outreach to Carpatho-Russian Uniate immigrants converting to Orthodoxy, and founded parishes across the northeastern United States and Canada. He was attacked and beaten unconscious in Bayonne, New Jersey while preaching to potential converts, and received a package containing an unexploded bomb and a threatening note at the cathedral. He traveled to Portsmouth, New Hampshire, to lead a thanksgiving service after the signing of the Treaty of Portsmouth in 1905. In February 1914, he brought the cathedral choir to perform at the White House. Three weeks later, he was recalled to Europe after exactly eighteen years of service in America.
The parish at Grand Street was one of the last he helped establish before his departure. In October 1907, Archbishop Platon of New York asked Hotovitzky to assume temporary oversight of the newly incorporated Saints Peter and Paul congregation, which had formed from a breakaway group of Eastern Rite Catholic immigrants. He celebrated the parish's first Divine Liturgy at a rented house at 64 Grand Street on October 24, 1907. His assignment was explicitly temporary: he was simultaneously serving as Dean of St. Nicholas Cathedral in Manhattan. In 1908, Fr. Alexander Nemolovsky replaced him as the first permanent resident rector.
After his recall, Hotovitzky served in Helsinki under Archbishop Sergius (Stragorodsky) and then at Christ the Savior Cathedral in Moscow from 1917, arriving on the eve of the Bolshevik Revolution. When the Soviet government decreed the confiscation of church valuables in 1922, Hotovitzky was among those who implemented Patriarch Tikhon's order of resistance. He was arrested before he could present a protest resolution at a parish meeting on March 23, 1922. At the resulting show trial of 105 defendants, prosecuted by the future Nuremberg prosecutor Andrey Vishinsky, Hotovitzky remained calm under questioning and deflected blame from his co-defendants. He was sentenced to ten years imprisonment. After receiving amnesty in 1923 following Patriarch Tikhon's loyalty statements to the Soviet government, he was exiled to the Arctic Turukhan region and then later returned to serve at a Moscow parish. A parishioner who saw him in 1936 recalled eyes that "penetrated your heart and embraced it with affection."
On August 19, 1937, the Feast of the Transfiguration on the Old Calendar, he was arrested during Stalin's Great Purge, sentenced to death, and shot. He was buried at Donskoye Cemetery in Moscow. In 1994, the Russian Orthodox Church and the Orthodox Church in America jointly glorified him as a New Martyr and Confessor of Russia. His icon now stands on the first tier of the iconostasis of the rebuilt Christ the Savior Cathedral in Moscow. In Jersey City, the City Council designated one block of Grand Street in front of the cathedral as "Saint Alexander Hotovitzky Way" on December 2, 2007, timed to the centennial of his first liturgy here.
Alexander Alekseevich Nemolovsky was born on August 30, 1876, in the village of Gulsk in the Volhynia Eparchy of the Russian Empire, now part of Ukraine. A priest's son, he attended the Volhynia Theological Seminary and then the St. Petersburg Theological Academy, graduating in 1901. He was ordained deacon and then priest in November and December 1901 by Bishop Sergius (Stragorodsky), the future Patriarch of Moscow. Within months, he crossed the Atlantic with orders from Bishop Tikhon (Bellavin), another future Patriarch and now a canonized saint, to serve as a missionary priest in the northeastern United States.
Nemolovsky served first in North Catasauqua, Pennsylvania, then as the founding rector of St. Nicholas Russian Orthodox Church in Reading, Pennsylvania. He edited the newspaper Svit, a Galician Ukrainian and Russian publication serving immigrant communities, and worked with the Russian Immigrants House in New York City. In 1908, Archbishop Platon assigned him to Jersey City as the first permanent resident rector of Saints Peter and Paul, where he lived at 131 Grand Street for $25 per month. During his brief but consequential tenure, he helped engineer the purchase of the former First Reformed Dutch Church at 111-113 Grand Street for $35,000 in February 1909, which remains the parish home today. He supervised the acquisition of a hand-carved oak iconostasis for $1,200 and signed the parish's Certificate of Incorporation in August 1909. In early 1909, Archbishop Platon elevated him to the dignity of Archpriest.
In November 1909, the Holy Synod of the Russian Church elected Nemolovsky as the first vicar bishop of the North American Archdiocese. He was tonsured a monk, elevated to Archimandrite, and on November 15/28, 1909, consecrated Bishop of Sitka at the Alexander Nevsky Lavra in St. Petersburg by Metropolitan Antony (Vadkovsky) and four hierarchs, each of whom would later lead a different Orthodox jurisdiction: Archbishop Sergius of Vyborg, Archbishop Antony Khrapovitsky, Archbishop Platon of North America, and Bishop Evlogiy of Kholm.
As Bishop of Alaska (1909-1916) and then Bishop of Winnipeg and Canada (1916-1917), Nemolovsky traveled through remote Alaskan parishes and grappled with the explosive question of Ukrainian ecclesiastical autonomy in Canada, a decision that contributed to the founding of the Ukrainian Greek Orthodox Church of Canada in 1918. When Archbishop Evdokim departed for Russia in 1917 and never returned, Nemolovsky again served as administrator of the entire North American Archdiocese.
In February 1919, at St. Theodosius Cathedral in Cleveland, the Second All-American Sobor elected him Archbishop of the Aleutians and North America in a secret ballot: the first election of an Orthodox Primate by clergy and laity together in the Western Hemisphere, establishing the precedent for all subsequent elections of the OCA's primates. Patriarch Tikhon confirmed the election in August 1920. Archbishop Nemolovsky inherited a church with a $100,000 debt, severed from all support from Russia after the Revolution, and fractured along ethnic lines. Bolshevik-aligned clergy under Fr. John Kedrovsky agitated to seize church properties, eventually winning a court judgment awarding them St. Nicholas Cathedral in Manhattan in 1925. In 1922, Nemolovsky concluded it was best for the Church that he step aside, writing to Metropolitan Platon to assume leadership. He departed the United States in June 1922 after two decades of service.
After years in Constantinople and on Mount Athos, Nemolovsky was appointed Archbishop of Brussels and Belgium in 1936, becoming in effect the first resident Orthodox bishop in Belgium. On November 4, 1940, forty Gestapo officers arrested him immediately after the Divine Liturgy. He was handcuffed before his congregation and taken to Berlin, where he was imprisoned for the duration of the war. Released in 1945, he returned to Brussels, established two nursing homes for Russian refugees, and served daily liturgy into his eighties. On November 28, 1959, he was elevated to Metropolitan of Brussels and Belgium. He died on April 11, 1960, the Monday of Holy Week, and was buried at Ixelles Cemetery in Brussels.
Between Nemolovsky's elevation to the episcopate in 1909 and the arrival of Fr. Adamiak in 1920, at least seven clergymen served at the parish on Grand Street. Several held distinguished positions in the broader life of American Orthodoxy. Their full tenure dates at Jersey City remain only partially documented in publicly available records.
Born 1880 in Becherov, Austria-Hungary. Dean of the New Jersey Deanery. Prolific author and editor of Orthodox publications. Served at the parish on multiple occasions. Died 1969 in Passaic, NJ, where he served as founding rector of St. John the Baptist Church for 44 years.
Vice President and Secretary of the Metropolitan Council of the Russian Orthodox Greek Catholic Church in North America. Led the 1945 delegation attempting to reach the Moscow Council for the election of Patriarch Alexei I, traveling by plane to Siberia and then by train before arriving too late for the election. Died 1966 in Elizabeth, NJ.
Served as secretary to Bishop Adam (Philipovsky) at St. Nicholas Cathedral, New York. He and his wife physically held the bishop's residence against lawyers and police during the 1925 cathedral dispute, while their young son, age five, was described by Time Magazine as "howling faithfully." Died 1958 in a parish house fire in Robins, Ohio.
Also served as pastor of the Russian Orthodox St. Peter and Paul Church at 121 East 7th Street, Manhattan. Referenced in The New York Times (1938). Death date and location recorded as New York, NY in OCA Diptychs.
Served as a trusted intermediary between the Archbishop and the hierarchy in the New York area during the early period of the diocese. Died 1938.
Listed in OCA Commemorative Diptychs under Archpriest rank. Died 1936. Further biographical details have not been found in publicly available records.
Born 1898, died March 1966 in Passaic, NJ. Listed in OCA Diptychs under Archpriest rank.
The shepherd must be sober and vigilant, of good character, adorned with every virtue, so that all may be edified by his example as well as his words.
St. Basil the Great
John J. Adamiak was born in 1889 in Mayfield, Pennsylvania. At the age of fourteen, he left for Russia to study at the seminary in Zhitomir, Volhynia, having been selected by Bishop Tikhon, the future Patriarch of Moscow. He returned to the United States and completed his theological training at the newly established seminary in Minneapolis, graduating in 1911. He was ordained by Bishops Alexander and Raphael, becoming one of the first American-born Orthodox priests.
He arrived at Saints Peter and Paul in 1920 and remained for the rest of his life. For most of his twenty years at the parish, he served concurrently as Dean of all parishes in the state of New Jersey, a position that gave him oversight of the growing Orthodox communities throughout the Garden State. He was also a spiritual advisor and auditor of the Russian Orthodox Mutual Aid Society, a member of the Educational Committee of the North American Theological Seminary Alumni Association, and a contributor to the publication of the Divine Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom.
The most lasting achievement of his rectorship was the transformation of the church interior. Having simplified the ceiling trusses and installed a new spruce ceiling to prepare the walls, Fr. Adamiak engaged Photius Bodasiuk, an iconographer from Kiev who had recently come to America. Bodasiuk spent three years painting over 70 murals with decorative stenciled borders throughout the church, working both at a studio he rented at 119 Grand Street and directly on the walls. The paintings in the iconostasis were executed by Sergei Sokoloff. A professional art dealer later valued the complete program at $136,000. During this same period, three bells were purchased and installed in the towers, donated by George and Eva Churik (small bell), Timothy Filiak (medium bell), and the Saints Peter and Paul Brotherhood with the parishioners (large bell). Their tones are the musical notes A, C-sharp, and E. Theodore Gall donated the small crystal chandeliers. The large center chandelier, containing over 45,000 pieces of Czechoslovakian crystal, was funded by donations from the entire parish.
Father Adamiak died suddenly in December 1940 at the age of fifty-one, while still in active service as rector. He had reduced the parish debt to $11,000 over his tenure. He is buried at the grounds of St. Tikhon's Monastery in South Canaan, Pennsylvania. In his memory, the parish placed a Golgotha and a side altar in the church where requiem services are held.
Michael G. Dziama was born on November 11, 1894, into a clerical family of Carpatho-Russian descent, the surname concentrated in the Podkarpackie region of southeastern Poland and Ukraine. He held both a law degree and his priestly rank, serving as Legal Advisor on the Metropolitan Council of the Russian Orthodox Church in America, the highest administrative body of the Metropolia. His was a dual vocation, at a time when parish clergy often needed legal training to navigate the complex property and incorporation disputes that marked American Orthodox institutional life.
He arrived at Saints Peter and Paul in February 1941, inheriting a congregation with an outstanding debt of $11,000, the legacy of building and property acquisitions stretching back to 1909. His first major accomplishment was the complete retirement of this debt. On a Sunday in May 1943, the mortgage was burned ceremonially in the church hall before the entire congregation.
In the same year, Fr. Dziama organized the Jersey City chapter of the Federated Russian Orthodox Clubs, known as the Senior "R" Club Chapter 129. Within a year the chapter had 150 members, the largest of any chapter in the national federation. The parish also organized a Junior "R" Club, a Women's Altar Guild under the protection of the Virgin Mary, and a Sunday School program that began in 1942 with four classes from kindergarten through advanced, enrolling ninety pupils in Bible, prayers, catechism, and Orthodox tradition.
Father Dziama died in office on September 5, 1944, after three and a half years at the parish. He was 49 years old. His daughter Annette later established the Very Rev. Michael and Matushka Anna Dziama Scholarship Fund at Saint Vladimir's Orthodox Theological Seminary in memory of her parents, ensuring that his name continues to support the training of Orthodox clergy.
Dimitri J. Ressetar became rector on November 1, 1944, one of the few transitions in the parish's history that followed a death in office rather than a voluntary departure. He arrived at a parish that had just emerged from debt for the first time in decades, with an active lay organization and a recently completed mural program.
Under his leadership, parish income doubled, reaching $17,400 in 1946. On June 11, 1946, he secured the building at 109 Grand Street, which would serve as the clergy residence. In 1952, the vacant lot at 101 Grand Street was purchased from the City of Jersey City. By April 1947, the parish had grown to 615 families, an increase of 585 since 1909. The details of Fr. Ressetar's departure from the parish and his subsequent ministry are not fully documented in publicly available records.
Emilian Skuby was born on August 16, 1898, in the village of Zamch, in the Chelm region of Russia, now southeastern Poland. He came to the United States on August 25, 1913. He graduated from the Russian Orthodox Theological Seminary in Tenafly, New Jersey, on June 15, 1922, one of the last classes at that campus before the seminary relocated to New York City. He was ordained deacon on July 20, 1924, and to the priesthood on July 24, 1924.
Over the following decades, Fr. Skuby served parishes in Lachine, Quebec; Alpha, New Jersey; Central City, Pennsylvania; Singac, New Jersey; Ambridge, Pennsylvania; and South River, New Jersey, before his assignment to Saints Peter and Paul. He was Spiritual Adviser of the Federated Russian Orthodox Clubs for the New Jersey District and had previously served as Dean of the church district surrounding Ambridge and as an adviser of the Metropolitan Council of the Cathedral of the Transfiguration in New York.
At Jersey City, he completed a major renovation of the church hall in 1948. In November 1951, a new Altar Table and two Lectern Tables were purchased and dedicated by His Grace Bishop Demetrius of Philadelphia. The basement of the church was renovated for educational purposes at a cost of $36,633, made possible by a $10,000 interest-free loan from parishioner John Stefura. The Sunday School expanded to 11 teachers with 125 students attending. Monday and Wednesday evenings saw 45 students in Russian school; Fridays brought a catechism class.
In his twenty-eight years of priesthood, Fr. Skuby asked for little for himself, consistently urging his congregation to give their wholehearted devotion to the Church and to Orthodoxy. He died in active service on August 6, 1952, in Jersey City, having served this parish to his last day. He was 53 years old.
John Skvir was born on May 9, 1922, in Ganister, Pennsylvania, a limestone quarry hamlet in the Appalachian ridges, where his parents had emigrated from the Carpathian regions of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. His father worked atop a stone crusher at the Pittsburgh Limestone Corporation quarry. John was baptized at St. Mary's Holy Assumption Orthodox Church, founded in 1916 by the quarry workers' families. He graduated from Williamsburg High School and entered St. Tikhon's Orthodox Theological Seminary in South Canaan, Pennsylvania, graduating with the Class of 1943.
Before ordination, he married Barbara Wisloski of Holy Resurrection Cathedral in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, the historic parish founded by the now-canonized St. Alexis Toth. He was ordained at the Cathedral of the Holy Virgin Protection in Manhattan. His first assignment, at age twenty-one, was a double parish: Saints Peter and Paul in Moundsville, West Virginia, and Saints Cyril and Methodius in Bellaire, Ohio. In 1946, he moved to Saint Nicholas Orthodox Church in Donora, Pennsylvania, where he undertook an extraordinary building project: a new church built in the Novgorod architectural style, one of the few such structures in the United States. He laid brick in his work clothes on weekdays while serving liturgies in vestments on Sundays. The church still stands at 1 Saint Nicholas Drive, Donora, complete when he departed for Jersey City in 1952.
At Saints Peter and Paul, he served for 35 years and oversaw a series of practical improvements: a new rectory at 107-109 Grand Street in 1960, designed by architect Maurice Kraut; a 3,264-grave section at Graceland Memorial Park in Kenilworth in 1964 for $88,000; the electrification of the three church bells in 1964; and carved teak doors imported from Hong Kong in 1965. Throughout his tenure, the parish held its identity as one of the largest congregations in the OCA.
Fr. Skvir's most consequential contribution to American Orthodoxy lay beyond Jersey City. As a long-serving member of the Metropolitan Council and the OCA Department of External Affairs, he was appointed to the Special Negotiating Committee that carried out the talks leading to the OCA's autocephaly in 1970. He was the only individual who participated in all the preliminary negotiations held across multiple continents: the Hotel New Yorker in Manhattan in January 1969, the Metropolitan's residence in Syosset in February 1969, Geneva in August 1969, Tokyo in August 1969, and Syosset again in March 1970. In May 1970, he traveled to Moscow as part of the official seven-member delegation to receive the Tomos of Autocephaly from the Moscow Patriarchate, traveling alongside a young hieromonk named Kirill who is now Patriarch of Moscow. Neither Frs. Schmemann nor Meyendorff, his colleagues on the negotiating committee, made the Moscow trip, making Skvir the sole continuous presence from first meeting to final ceremony.
He was blessed with a fine baritone voice and was known as a demanding standard-setter for choral excellence in worship. Over decades he amassed a substantial collection of Orthodox liturgical scores, including hundreds of pre-Revolutionary Russian sheet music pieces. After his death, this collection was combined with the music library of Archpriest Constantine Buketoff and his son Igor Buketoff, the conductor who orchestrated Rachmaninoff's unfinished opera Monna Vanna, and donated to the Georges Florovsky Library at Saint Vladimir's Seminary in Yonkers. The combined Skvir-Buketoff Liturgical Music Collection, comprising four boxes of scores published between 1819 and 1950, preserves material found nowhere else.
At the Fifth All-American Council in Montreal in 1977, during the Divine Liturgy preceding the election of a new Metropolitan, the service was conducted entirely in Church Slavonic. Fr. Skvir gave a loud pitch and began singing the Creed in English. The congregation followed, overpowering the cathedral's Russian choir. His son Archpriest Daniel later reflected that it was "a sign of things to come." Fr. John Skvir reposed unexpectedly in 1987 while still in active service. He was succeeded by his close friend, the former OCA Chancellor Fr. Daniel Hubiak. He is buried at Saint Tikhon's Monastery Cemetery in South Canaan, Pennsylvania.
Daniel Afanasy Hubiak was born on December 29, 1926, in Akron, Ohio, the son of Archpriest Afanasy G. Hubiak, a Carpatho-Russian missionary priest who had served in Czechoslovakia before returning to pastor St. Nicholas Church in Mogadore, Ohio. The elder Hubiak died in April 1945 and is commemorated in the OCA Diptychs. Daniel came of age during the Depression, worked as a journeyman mechanic, served in the Army after the war, and then enrolled simultaneously at St. Vladimir's Orthodox Theological Seminary and Columbia University on the working agreement that allowed seminarians to earn Columbia degrees while pursuing theological formation at St. Vladimir's. The seminary at the time occupied rented apartments on West 121st Street in Manhattan, borrowed from Union Theological Seminary, with no kitchen and few amenities. The faculty, however, was extraordinary: Fr. Georges Florovsky, George Fedotov, Nicholas Arseniev, and, arriving from Paris just at the end of Hubiak's studies, Fr. Alexander Schmemann. Hubiak's response to those austere years was characteristically practical: he built an iconostasis for the seminary's simple chapel with his own hands. He graduated in the Class of 1951.
On September 16, 1951, he married Evdokia (Dunia) Martynuk of Brooklyn at Holy Protection Cathedral in New York. Matushka Dunia would prove an indispensable partner across sixty-nine years of marriage and ministry. Ordained deacon and then priest by Metropolitan Leonty in September 1952, Fr. Daniel served parishes in Detroit, Marblehead, Ohio, and Brooklyn before becoming pastor of Holy Trinity Church in East Meadow, Long Island, in 1958, where he led the construction of a new church building. In 1963, the 11th All-American Sobor created three officer positions for the Metropolia, and Fr. Daniel was invited to serve as Treasurer while still at East Meadow. After the historic 1st All-American Council of the newly autocephalous OCA in 1970, he added the role of Secretary. When Protopresbyter Joseph Pishtey, the last Chancellor of the Metropolia and first of the OCA, reposed in November 1972, Fr. Daniel was named Chancellor. During the late 1970s, with the Secretary and Treasurer positions both vacant, he managed the duties of all three offices simultaneously. He remains the only person in OCA history to have held each of the three officer positions established in 1963.
In May 1970, months before formally assuming the chancellorship, Fr. Daniel was named to the seven-member OCA delegation sent to Moscow to receive the Tomos of Autocephaly: the document by which the Moscow Patriarchate recognized the OCA as a self-governing church. The delegation, headed by Bishop Theodosius, included his seminary roommate Constantine Kallaur, Mitred Archpriest John Skvir of Saints Peter and Paul in Jersey City, and four others. Patriarch Aleksy I had signed the Tomos on April 10, 1970, and died a week later. The delegation received it from Metropolitan Pimen on May 18, in the presence of U.S. Ambassador Jacob Beam. That August, Fr. Daniel participated in the glorification of Saint Herman of Alaska in Kodiak. Two momentous events in a single summer. While in Moscow, the idea occurred to him that the new autocephalous Church ought one day to have a permanent representation in the Russian capital: a vision he would personally realize two decades later. His fifteen years as Chancellor, from 1973 to 1988, encompassed the OCA's most critical formative period, including the 1974 move of the Chancery from Manhattan to Syosset and the administrative consolidation of the young church under two metropolitans.
In 1988, Fr. Daniel left the chancery and accepted assignment as rector of Saints Peter and Paul in Jersey City, succeeding his close friend Fr. John Skvir, who had reposed unexpectedly in 1987 after thirty-five years in this pulpit. Within two years, as the Soviet bloc began to open, he and parishioner Alexander Dorman launched the Russia Help Project: a monthly humanitarian airlift of clothing, medicines, food, and school supplies routed directly to Fr. Alexander Men's parish north of Moscow, deliberately bypassing governmental channels. Fr. Men was murdered on September 9, 1990, the very day the project was inaugurated. Five additional OCA parishes joined the effort. The project was documented in OCA Parish Ministry Resources, Volume II (1991) and foreshadowed the far larger humanitarian work Fr. Daniel would undertake in Russia. His successor at Saints Peter and Paul, Very Rev. Joseph Lickwar, was appointed rector on December 1, 1991.
Effective January 1, 1992, Fr. Daniel and Matushka Dunia were assigned to Moscow, where he became the first OCA Representative to the Moscow Patriarchate. Within weeks of their arrival, on February 22, 1992, the relics of Saint Patriarch Tikhon were discovered hidden beneath the floor of the small cathedral at Donskoy Monastery. Hubiak reached his contact by telephone with minutes to spare and stood at the opening of the casket as Patriarch Aleksy II presided. Both he and Matushka Dunia published first-hand accounts of that afternoon, which remain on the OCA website. In 1994, Patriarch Aleksy II offered the OCA a choice of churches for a permanent representation. They chose the Church of Saint Catherine the Great Martyr on Bolshaya Ordynka, built in 1766 by decree of Empress Catherine II, shuttered by Soviet authorities in 1931, and used for offices ever since. On December 7, 1994, the Feast of Saint Catherine, Patriarch Aleksy II and Metropolitan Theodosius concelebrated the inaugural service in the building in over sixty years. Fr. Daniel led the restoration of both the church and its auxiliary building over the following years. On June 11, 1999, the consecration of the new altar and iconostasis was celebrated with many American pilgrims in attendance. The OCA also entered into a $17 million agreement with the USDA to ship 12,000 tons of food to Russia; Hubiak personally met the first 400-ton shipment of dried milk upon arrival.
In February 1997, Patriarch Aleksy II awarded Fr. Daniel the Order of Saint Daniel, 2nd Degree. The following month, the OCA Holy Synod elevated him to the rank of Protopresbyter. In June 2001, Patriarch Aleksy II presented him with the Order of Saint Sergius, Second Class, at the Patriarchal Residence. He and Matushka Dunia returned to the United States that same year, celebrating their 50th wedding anniversary at the Syosset chancery offices. They settled in Ocean Pines, Maryland, where, beginning on March 5, 2000, he had already celebrated the first Divine Liturgy of what would become Christ the Savior Orthodox Church in Berlin, Maryland: the first OCA mission planted in the new millennium. In August 2017, Metropolitan Tikhon presented both Fr. Daniel and Matushka Dunia with the Order of St. Innocent, Gold Class, the OCA's highest award. In December 2019, at ninety-three, he traveled to Moscow for the 25th anniversary of St. Catherine's, where Metropolitan Hilarion presented him the Medal of Saint Mark of Ephesus, 1st Degree, and Patriarch Kirill acknowledged him personally. Protopresbyter Daniel Hubiak reposed on February 5, 2021, at his home in Ocean Pines, at the age of ninety-four, with Matushka Dunia at his side. He is buried at Saint Tikhon's Monastery Cemetery in South Canaan, Pennsylvania. Metropolitan Tikhon wrote: "Father Daniel was a fiery flame whose light will continue to shine with particular brilliance."
Joseph Lickwar was born in East Chicago, Indiana, in the Calumet Region steel country of Northwest Indiana, into a Carpatho-Russian immigrant family. He trained at Christ the Saviour Seminary in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, founded in 1940 by Metropolitan Orestes (Chornock), the founding hierarch of the American Carpatho-Russian Orthodox Diocese. On July 7, 1963, he was ordained to the Holy Priesthood by Metropolitan Orestes himself at Christ the Saviour Cathedral in Johnstown, one generation removed from the founding of that diocese. He and Matushka Shirley (née Michalov, of Turtle Creek, Pennsylvania) had been married one month earlier, on June 9, 1963.
He served Carpatho-Russian parishes in Akron, Ohio; McKeesport, Pennsylvania; and East Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania over the following decade, while also teaching Scripture and homiletics at Christ the Saviour Seminary. In 1974, he was received into the Orthodox Church in America and assigned to St. Nicholas Orthodox Church in Whitestone, Queens, New York, where he served for seventeen years and was elected Dean of the New York City Deanery. On December 1, 1991, he was appointed rector of Saints Peter and Paul in Jersey City.
The church he inherited was a Gothic Revival brownstone built in 1853, purchased by the Orthodox congregation in 1909 and transformed over the following decades with onion dome cupolas, three copper-domed towers, an imported crystal chandelier of 45,000 pieces, and 70 murals painted by Photius Bodasiuk of Kiev. The building sat within the Paulus Hook Historic District, listed on the State and National Register of Historic Places since 1982, and it required serious attention. Fr. Lickwar's response was the "Giving the Past a Future" campaign, a six-year restoration from 2000 to 2006 that secured three matching grants from the New Jersey Historic Trust totaling $586,736, as part of a $1.1 million three-phase program. The Historic Trust described the building as "a rare historical document and architectural expression of immigration and cultural assimilation." Fr. Lickwar personally negotiated the grants and oversaw the hiring of a historic architect and construction company. The restoration was completed in time for the parish's centennial in 2007.
As Diocesan Chancellor under Archbishop Peter (L'Huillier), through the administrative transition that followed Peter's retirement in 2005, and then under Archbishop Michael (Dahulich), Fr. Lickwar served as the institutional backbone of the Diocese of New York and New Jersey for three hierarchs. He was appointed Dean of the New Jersey Deanery in 2003. In 2006, he co-organized an African-American outreach conference in Newark with Fr. Brian Rawls, featuring speakers including Protopresbyter Thomas Hopko and Dr. Albert Raboteau. On May 8, 2010, Saints Peter and Paul Church served as the site of the consecration of Bishop Michael (Dahulich), one of three bishops whom Fr. Lickwar had formed as a seminary professor, before an assembly of over 1,000 faithful including nine hierarchs.
On December 6, 2020, the Feast of Saint Nicholas, Archbishop Michael elevated Saints Peter and Paul to Cathedral status: one of three diocesan cathedrals of the Diocese of New York and New Jersey.
On June 10, 2018, Archbishop Michael awarded Fr. Lickwar the Mitre, the highest liturgical honor for a married priest in the Slavic Orthodox tradition, reserved normally for bishops, on the occasion of his 55th anniversary of ordination. The Archbishop's proclamation read in part: "For serving every Liturgy as if it were his first Liturgy, his only liturgy and his last Liturgy: Axios!" After 32 years at the Cathedral, Fr. Lickwar retired in 2023 and relocated to Orange, Connecticut, where he remains associated with St. Athanasius Chapel. He continues to serve as Chancellor of the Diocese of New York and New Jersey.
Father Solomon Longo was assigned as Acting Rector of Saints Peter and Paul on June 1, 2023, and was named Rector a year later. He succeeded Mitred Archpriest Joseph Lickwar, who had served the parish for 32 years. Fr. Solomon is a native of North Carolina. His father grew up in New Jersey, raised Catholic, and converted to the Baptist church after relocating to North Carolina. A generation later, in a twist of providential irony, his son returned to Jersey as an Orthodox priest. Before coming to Jersey City, the Longo family had made their home in Texas, Alaska, and Pennsylvania.
He trained at St. Tikhon's Orthodox Theological Seminary in South Canaan, Pennsylvania, where seminary classmates described him as hard-working, thoughtful, and a willing volunteer who contributed to campus renovations. He graduated with a Master of Divinity degree. Archbishop Michael (Dahulich) ordained him to the diaconate on January 29, 2022, and to the priesthood on January 21, 2023. Both ordinations took place at St. Tikhon's Monastery. As a deacon, he concelebrated the Hierarchical Divine Liturgy at the cathedral's 115th anniversary on October 30, 2022, alongside Archbishop Michael and Fr. Lickwar: a service that, in retrospect, looks very much like a deliberate introduction between a seminary deacon and the parish he would lead. The span from his first appearance at Grand Street as a seminarian to his appointment as its rector was less than eight months.
He and Matushka Anna arrived at the rectory at 109 Grand Street with their five sons. In January 2024, they welcomed their daughter Hattie Olympia Longo, bringing the family to six children. On April 23rd, 2026, their sixth son, Peter Augustine Longo, made seven: six sons and one daughter. When asked for more information about himself, he offers this: "Of all the priests you could ever meet, I am certainly one of them."
He hopes to see Saints Peter and Paul Cathedral grow in the Way, the Truth, and the Life, and he believes that following Christ offers us all nothing less than our most free, fulfilled, and complete life in a world set right.