Gleb Rahr

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Gleb Rahr

Gleb Alexandrowitsch Rahr , pseudonym : Alexej Wetrow ( Russian Глеб Александрович Рар ; born October 3, 1922 in Moscow ; †  March 3, 2006 in Freising ) was a Russian exile journalist and church historian .

Live and act

Youth and Studies

Rahr came from a Baltic merchant family of Scandinavian origin who belonged to the class of hereditary honorary citizens of the Russian Empire (this class was equated with the nobility at the beginning of the 20th century ), and was the son of the businessman Alexander Alexandrovich Rahr (1885, Moscow - 1952, London ) and his second wife Natalija Sergejewna Judin ( Russian Юдин ) (1897 Moscow - 1980 Neufahrn near Freising ). In 1924, the family was Rahr of Estonia reported, however, moved in the fall of that year Libau in Kurland ( Latvia ) to where Gleb Rahr grew up and the German School , the High School made. After the occupation of Latvia by the Red Army in 1940, the family managed to escape to Germany with the last evacuation ship Brake to leave Libau on March 5, 1941 as part of the resettlement of members of German minorities to the German Reich (see German-Baltic States ) . It owed this to its German-sounding name.

From 1942 Rahr studied architecture at the University of Breslau , where he also helped establish the local Russian Orthodox church community. At that time he joined the " Association of Russian Solidarists " (Narodno-Trudowoi Soyuz - NTS), for which he went to Berlin for a conspiratorial interview with its chairman W. M. Baidalakov . Together with the Chorvat couple, Rahr organized an NTS underground group in a research camp, where prisoners of war analyzed scientific and technical documents confiscated by the Germans in Russia. In order to prevent the NTS from influencing the Russian Liberation Army , the National Socialists arrested a number of NTS members in June 1944, including Gleb Rahr on June 14. After several interrogations in the Gestapo control center in Wroclaw , he was finally put into so-called “ protective custody ” and lived through an agonizing time in the concentration camps in Groß-Rosen , Sachsenhausen , Schlieben , Buchenwald and Dachau . Rahr was one of the survivors of the prisoner transport from Buchenwald to Dachau . On April 29, 1945 he witnessed the liberation of the Dachau concentration camp by the Americans.

In the summer of 1945 the Rahr family came to the Mönchehof refugee camp (now part of Espenau ) near Kassel , where the headquarters of the NTS was temporarily located. She then moved to Hamburg , where Rahr worked as secretary to Bishop Nathanaels (Prince Lwow), the bishop of the Russian Church Abroad in Germany's British zone of occupation , and also served as a subdeacon .

Activity as a journalist

From the end of 1947, Rahr worked for the Possev publishing house in Frankfurt am Main . In 1949 and 1950 he lived with his family in Casablanca in French Morocco , where he worked in an architectural office and actively participated in church life. At that time, Rahr was also an active scout (boy scout name “Seehund”) and was appointed head of the Africa department of the Russian scout organization ORJuR.

From 1950 Rahr worked for the NTS in Germany. From West Berlin he tried to spread anti-communist propaganda in the GDR . He took part in the Four Power Conferences in 1954 in Berlin and Geneva and in the "Pan-American Conference for the Protection of the Continent" in Lima in 1957 . He paid particular attention to the situation of the Church and the faithful in Russia. Under the pseudonym Alexej Wetrow he wrote numerous articles in 1954, the book " Plenennaya Zerkow ' " (Church in Captivity) about the situation of the Church in the Soviet Union, which was published in Russian by the Possev Verlag .

From 1957 to 1960 Gleb Rahr worked at the radio station of the NTS "Free Russia" in Formosa (now Taiwan ), from 1960 to 1963 he headed the Russian-speaking program of the Japanese Radio in Tokyo and taught at the Far Eastern department of the American University of Maryland Russian Language (later he taught Russian literature and history in Germany for the European department of the same university). From 1963 to 1974 he worked again for the Possev publishing house in Frankfurt.

In 1972 Gleb Rahr participated in Frankfurt together with Iwan Agrusow, Cornelia Gerstenmaier u. a. at the foundation of the Society for Human Rights (GfM, today ISHR).

From 1974 to 1995 Rahr worked at Radio Liberty in Munich . Here he directed the religious broadcasts that radiated to the Soviet Union as well as the radio programs “The Baltic Lighthouse”, “Russia yesterday, today and tomorrow” and “Not from bread alone”. Despite some resistance, he always remained true to his convictions and principles and not only defended the canonical orthodox positions, but also the good name of Russia. A loyal colleague to him was always the Nobel Prize winner Alexander Solzhenitsyn , with whom he shared common ideas and values. For many people in the Soviet Union, Gleb Rahr's broadcasts were the only way to get truthful information about the situation of the Russian Orthodox Church.

Activity in the Russian Church Abroad

In addition to his extensive journalistic work, subdeacon Gleb Rahr was also a well-known churchman. In Frankfurt from 1967 to 1968, as a member of the building committee, he was extremely active in the construction of the Russian Church of St. Nicholas in Frankfurt-Hausen . Among other things, he was responsible for the procurement of the bells, which he cast on site in a traditional workshop in Saarburg . The inscriptions and crosses on the bells were cast according to his drawings. The large chandelier in the church was also built according to his plans. In 1967 Rahr was ordained a subdeacon by Metropolitan Filaret (Voznesenskij), the first hierarch of the Russian Church Abroad.

For many years Rahr was a member of the Diocesan Council of the German Diocese of the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad and of the municipal councils in Frankfurt and Munich. He was one of the most important employees of the " Orthodox Action " (Prawoslawnoe Delo), an organization that tried to spread the Christian faith in Russia by smuggling in religious literature, and in 1972 was a co-founder of the Swiss institute " Faith in the 2nd World " . Rahr took as a representative of the German diocese on III. Council of the Russian Church Abroad in New York in 1974 , where he gave a lecture on the situation of the Church in Russia. He has given such lectures almost all over the world for years. The highlight was his lecture tours during the celebrations for the millennium of the baptism of Russia in 1988, which he a. a. led to North America , Australia , France , Italy , Spain and other European countries. Of course he was not absent as a speaker at the celebrations in the cities of the German diocese . He enjoyed great respect and recognition in church circles. He was on friendly terms with many bishops, priests and activists of the Russian Church Abroad , and later also of the Moscow Patriarchate .

From 1983 to 2004 Rahr was chairman of the Brotherhood of the Holy Prince Vladimir . He endeavored to return the association, which in the past decades had almost exclusively dealt with the administration of its churches and houses, to the traditions of its founder, Archpriest Alexej Maltzew , and to open up new tasks and paths for it, for example in the charitable and journalistic area . From March 1996 to September 2002 he published seventeen editions of the Bratstwo-Bote , an association newspaper about the life and history of the brotherhood and the general situation of the Russian Orthodox Church. In addition, he published the Russian-language bulletin “Messages from the mass media on ecclesiastical, social and political life in Russia and in the diaspora ”, which dealt with current issues in the Church and Russia. In 1996 Rahr supported the establishment of a boarding school for street children by the diocese of the Kaliningrad region (formerly Koenigsberg in East Prussia ) in the city of Neman (formerly Ragnit) in Russia. This " Neman " project had to be abandoned after the financial crisis in Russia in 1998 and a devastating fire in the planned building in 2000. The money raised by Rahr has since served as the basis for the brotherhood's charity fund, which annually supports smaller children's aid projects in Russia.

When, after the celebrations for the Millennium of the Baptism of Russia in 1988, the church in the home country began to free itself from state control, Rahr increasingly advocated the reunification of the Russian Church abroad with the mother church, the Moscow Patriarchate . In 1990 he vehemently opposed the founding of parishes of the Russian Church Abroad on the territory of Russia, the canonical territory of the Moscow Patriarchate , which in his view was uncanonical . In August 1991, Rahr and his wife took part in the 1st “Congress of Compatriots” in Moscow , where he was received by Patriarch Alexej II , who through him brought the proposal for reunification to the leadership of the Church abroad . When this proposal was rejected, Rahr devoted his energies only more directly to the mother church .

On the site of the Dachau concentration camp memorial , the Russian Resurrection Chapel was built in 1994/1995 with the support of the former prisoner of this camp on the initiative of Archbishop Longin von Klin to commemorate the Orthodox victims of National Socialism and any tyranny, which eventually led to the establishment of a community of Moscow Patriarchate in Munich . On the central resurrection icon in the Dachau chapel, Gleb Rahr was indirectly immortalized by the icon painter Angela Hauser by having one of the inmates depicted there wear Rahr's inmate number R64923. Since Gleb Rahr's death, a small wooden cross has been kept in the chapel, which Rahr himself had made in the camp.

Gleb Rahr died on March 3, 2006 at the age of 83 in Freising with his family and was buried on March 11, 2006 in the Russian cemetery in Berlin-Tegel .

Works

  • Plenennaja Zerkov (Church in Captivity) (Russian), Possev-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1954
  • Russian churches in Germany . "The European East", No. 143, Munich 1967
  • On the history of the Japanese Orthodox Church , I, II, II in: Orthodoxe Rundschau 1973, No. 17-19
  • The Russian Orthodox Church Abroad: Her III. General Council in Jordanville / New York 1974 (German), Faith in the 2nd World, Küsnacht / Zurich 1974
  • Schiwoe nasledie velikoj Rossii: Bratstwo svjatogo Wladimira (A living legacy of great Russia: the Brotherhood of St. Vladimir) (Russian), in: Russkoe Vosroschdenie , No. 24, New York 1983
  • The Russian Church in Bad Kissingen (German), Possev-Verlag, Frankfurt 1984
  • Monasteries, Starzen and Icons: 1000 Years of the Russian Orthodox Church (German), Moers, 1988
  • One Hundred Years of the Russian Church Bad Kissingen (German), Kunstverlag Josef Fink, Lindenberg 1999
  • Bratskij Vestnik (Bratstwo-Bote) (Russian), No. 1–17, Bad Kissingen 1996–2002
  • I budet nasche pokolenje dawat 'istorii ottschet. Vospominanija (And our generation will be accountable to history. Memories) (Russian), Russkij Put 'publishing house, Moscow 2011, ISBN 978-5-85887-382-2

Honors

For his extensive work, Gleb Rahr was awarded a number of certificates of honor and thanks from the Russian Church Abroad and the Moscow Patriarchate , for example in 1988 by the Synod of Bishops of the Church Abroad and Bishop Mark of Berlin and Germany, in 2001 by the Polish Orthodox Church for his Merits for the rebuilding of the deconsecrated Orthodox Church in Görbersdorf ( Sokołowsko ), and most recently in 2004 by Patriarch Alexej II for his life's work. At the personal order of the President of the Russian Federation Vladimir Putin , Gleb Rahr and his wife were granted Russian citizenship in 2001 .

family

Rahr married on October 6, 1957 in Brussels Sofija Orekhov (1932-2019), the daughter of Captain Vassily Orekhov (1896-1990), who as a veteran of World War I and the Russian Civil War , as an activist of the "Russian general Krieger Federal" ( ROVS), as the founder of the "Russian National Association" (RNO), but above all as the founder and publisher of the magazine "Tschasowoj" (The Guard), the liaison body of Russian officers in exile, enjoyed great reputation in the Russian diaspora worldwide.

Their six children are all continuing their father's work in their own way: Alexander Rahr (born 1959) is a political scientist and international adviser to Russia in Berlin ; Xenia Rahr-Zabelitch (born 1960) is the wife of Archpriest Nikolai Zabelitch , the head of the Russian Orthodox community in Munich and Dachau , where she heads the church choir and is the chairwoman of the “Altenhilfe Moscow e. V. “organizes spiritual benefit concerts; Vsevolod (pseudonym: Benjamin) Rahr (born 1962) is a journalist in London ; Archpriest Michail Rahr (born 1963) is head of the Russian Church in Weimar ; Dimitrij Rahr (born 1964) is translator and successor to his father as chairman of the " Brotherhood of the Holy Prince Vladimir "; Irina Antal-Rahr (born 1966) is socially involved in the ecclesiastical and Russian exile milieu, for example in child and youth work .

literature

  • The Capital Daily News, Taipei, June 3, 1958.
  • Mourning for Gleb Rahr . In: Saale-Zeitung , Bad Kissingen, March 17, 2006.
  • Mourning for Gleb Rahr . In: Zeitschrift Menschenrechte , No. 1/2006.
  • Russian Munich . Publishing house Mir e. V., Munich 2010, ISBN 978-3-9805300-9-5 .

documentary

  • White Russians . Documentary by Richard Blank . Bayerischer Rundfunk, 1981.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. Mention of Xenia Rahr-Zabelitch in the program of Altenhilfe Moscow
  2. Short films by the journalist Benjamin Rahr
  3. Article about Mihail Rahr in the Orthpedia
  4. Mainpost article 2008
  5. Cf. The Russian Munich . Chapter Gleb Rahr . Publishing house Mir e. V., Munich 2010. p. 231