Event Details
Working Group for Palestinian Human Rights and Assisi Heights Spirituality Center presents:
Being A Voice for the Palestinian Christian Community with Mother Agapia Stephanopoulos
Wednesday, October 7 | 6:30-8:00pm
Free | In-Person | RSVP required
Donate to Convent of Saint Nicholas of Myra HERE
A witness to decades of political oppression, land theft, and targeted violence in the Holy Land, her work reflects years of lived experience. Her voice reveals the intimate truths often absent from headlines, reminding us that the Palestinian struggle is cultural, spiritual, and profoundly human.
Mother Agapia was raised in in a family with a strong tradition of serving the Greek Orthodox Church in America. During her college years at the University of Michigan, she joined a friend on a trip to Holy Trinity Monastery in Jordanville, New York, and soon began attending services of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia (ROCOR). As her Orthodox faith deepened she discerned a calling to monastic life and in 1991 was made a novice at the newly established Skete of Saint Elizabeth the New Martyr in Jordanville.
After a trip to Jerusalem in May 1996, she received a blessing to join the larger and well established Convent of Saint Mary Magdalene in Jerusalem. In September 1998 she was appointed administrator of the Convent’s Orthodox Girls School of Bethany located just over the Mount of Olives in the Palestinian town of Al-Azarya. Serving at the School until August 2005, a time which coincided with the Second Intifada, she became intimately connected to the lives and struggles of the local Palestinians, both Christian and Muslim.
Due to upheaval in the political situation and within the Church she returned to New York in 2008, where her current community, the Convent of Saint Nicholas of Myra, https://www.stnicholasconvent.org was established in May 2009. Her ministry at the Convent has included organizing youth retreats, and maintaining her ties to the Holy Land both by organizing twice yearly pilgrimages, and by inviting young Palestinian Christians to the Convent each summer to take part in social, cultural, and religious activities. The relationships developed between young Orthodox Christians in Palestine and the United States has been a source of joy and encouragement. The Convent recently relocated to Owego, New York, to be closer to Saint Maximus the Confessor Orthodox Church (GOC), whose members have long and faithfully supported the endeavors of the community.
We encourage you to register as soon as possible. Programs that do not meet the minimum enrollment two days before the scheduled date will be cancelled.
We ask all who enter Assisi Heights to recognize that this is the home of the Sisters of Saint Francis. Please be respectful of the property as well as the health of those around you and refrain from attending events if you are sick.
