Juvenal the Stranger of Sinai

Juvenal the Stranger, a hieromonk born in 1902 at Moinești, was the disciple and fellow struggler of Saint John Jacob the Hozevite, abbot of the Romanian skete at the Jordan, then a hermit at Mount Sinai, where he fell asleep in 1992, at ninety. He is named in the Romanian Paterikon and venerated by the faithful, without synodal canonization; the sources available to us give no day of commemoration.

In 1927 he entered the community of Durău Monastery and after two years went to Frăsinei, where he received monastic tonsure. In 1931 he left the country for good and joined the community of the Romanian Skete of the Prodromos on Athos, where he lived seven years as a hermit in several cells, a lover of solitude and a practitioner of the Jesus Prayer. In 1938 he went to the Holy Land and met John Jacob at Saint Sabbas Monastery, with whom he struggled until 1947.

When the Romanian monastery of Saint John the Baptist at the Jordan was founded, he settled there with John Jacob, abbot of the skete. In 1953 John withdrew to the wilderness, to the Cave of Saint Anne, and Juvenal remained abbot. He was ordained hieromonk by Patriarch Justinian, in 1965. In 1970 he went to Mount Sinai and struggled twenty years at the monasteries of Saint Catherine and Raithu, in harsh hermit asceticism.

He fell asleep in peace at great old age, in 1992, after glorifying God for ninety years.