Elias Berezovsky

Holy Hieromartyr Elias Berezovsky, a priest, was born on 20 July 1890 in the village of Glyaden in the Tomsk district of the Tomsk province, in a peasant family that owned a house, livestock and a few hectares of land. His full name was Elias Yakovlevich Berezovsky. He learned at the village school, and until the revolution he lived with his parents and helped with the farm.

In the time of revolution and godlessness the Lord called him to serve the Holy Church, and he received ordination. It is not known in what circumstances he was ordained, whether he was married and what became of his family, nor how he served in his native village. In 1933 he was arrested in his own region, which had become the Oyashinsky district of the Novosibirsk region, and was then driven out to Kazakhstan. He survived, returned home and lived there until 1937, when he lost his livelihood and shelter and took to the roads. In the NKVD papers he is recorded as a "wandering priest", without fixed residence or fixed occupation.

At the end of 1937 he came to the village of Chemolgan in the Alma-⁠Ata region of Kazakhstan. As a true shepherd, he did not turn away those who needed spiritual comfort and guidance. He spoke to the people of faithfulness to God and urged them not to yield to atheist propaganda. He also urged them to form a parish community in the village and to open a church. The investigator took his sermons for anti-⁠Soviet propaganda. On 14 December 1937 he was arrested by the Kaskelen district branch of the NKVD and imprisoned.

The investigator demanded that he incriminate himself, but he answered: "I do not admit my guilt." Since guilt could not be proved, the case was passed not to a court but to a troika. On 25 December the NKVD troika of the Alma-⁠Ata region sentenced him to ten years in a labour camp, a sentence few could survive. The case then lay for a month in a pile of others. On 1 February 1938 the troika met again, reworded the charge and this time decided: shooting. The sentence was carried out on 3 February 1938, and his body was laid in a common grave of the victims of terror at the Zhanalyk firing range in the Alma-⁠Ata region.

In the spring of 1989 the Prosecutor General's office of the Kazakh SSR reviewed the case. Father Elias was rehabilitated, since there was no proof of any criminal act and the decision had been given by a non-⁠judicial body. At the jubilee Council of Bishops in 2000 his name was added to the Synaxis of the New Martyrs and Confessors of the Russian Church. At the place where he and other martyrs rest, at Zhanalyk, a veneration cross has been set up. Priests of the nearby parishes serve moleben and panikhida services there, and the faithful come on pilgrimage. The saint is commemorated on 3 February, the day of his death, in the new style.