01 — A Jewish Family and a Secret Baptism

Alexander Vladimirovich Men was born in Moscow on 22 January 1935 into a Jewish family, and was baptized within months of his birth — together with his mother Elena — by a priest of the persecuted catacomb church, in secret, at Zagorsk. This section sets out the family from which he came and the clandestine act that placed him, from infancy, inside a Church that the Soviet state was then attempting to destroy.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (Moscow Patriarchate)

Almost everything distinctive about Men’s later life is prefigured in the first year of it. He was a Jew by birth and an Orthodox Christian from infancy, and both facts stayed with him: they gave him his lifelong preoccupation with the continuity of Israel and the Church, they gave his enemies the material for the ugliest of the attacks made on him, and they gave many of his eventual converts — a great many of whom were, like him, Jewish Muscovites — a reason to trust him. And he was baptized not in a functioning parish but in the catacombs, by a priest in hiding, at the height of the Great Terror.

The two files below separate the family from the act. The first treats his parents and grandparents, the milieu of the Moscow Jewish intelligentsia from which they came, and the two women — his mother Elena Semyonovna and his aunt Vera Vasilevskaya — whose memoirs are the primary documentary source for his childhood. The second treats the baptism itself: who Fr. Seraphim (Bityukov) was, what the catacomb church was, and why an infant baptism performed in secret in 1935 is a different kind of fact from an infant baptism performed in a parish.

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