Sister Theresa Kugel, OP (1912, Orekhovo-Zuyevo, Moscow Governorate, Russian Empire – 2 December 1977, Vilnius, Lithuanian SSR, Soviet Union), was a convert from Orthodox Judaism to the Russian Catholic Church, a Byzantine Rite Dominican nun in the community founded by Mother Catherine Abrikosova, and a Gulag survivor.
Mina Rakhmielovna Kugel was born in 1912 into the family of a rabbi[1] and grew up in Kostroma, where her father ran an illegal and underground synagogue in defiance of both Soviet anti-Judaism and anti-religious legislation.
Mina, however, grew up feeling torn between the Orthodox Jewish values of her family and the coercive indoctrination into both Marxist-Leninism and Atheism through the Soviet educational system.
[4] In 1929, a 15-year old Mina Kugel graduated from high school in Yaroslavl, and returned to her parents in Kostroma, where she became closely acquainted with two of her father's boarders, Stephanie Gorodets and Margarita Krylevskaya.
Both women were nuns of the Moscow community of the Third Order of Saint Dominic which had been founded in August 1917 by Mother Catherine Abrikosova.
After the Mass, Mina Kugel was looking at the Blessed Sacrament exposed in the Monstrance when she was overwhelmed by a new belief in the Real Presence and burst into tears.
She was secretly baptized into the Russian Greek Catholic Church, with Nora Rubashova as her godmother, by the former Symbolist poet Fr.
But after Bishop Pie Eugène Neveu gave her a flask of water from Lourdes, Kugel was cured and the doctors were allegedly unable to explain why.
As she had been qualified as minus 12 upon her recent release from the Gulag, Abrikosova could not remain in Moscow and chose instead to reside with Sister Margaret in Kostroma, where the Kugel family also lived, and where Theresa regularly visited her.
"[12] When Sister Margaret once warned her of the enormous dangers posed by Kugel's regular visits, Abrikosova, whose cancer had recently returned, replied, "For the good and salvation of just a single soul, I am willing to go to prison again and to save the soul of this little Theresa, I am ready for another ten year term"[13] According to Sister Philomena Ejsmont, the Kugel family only learned of Mina's conversion in late 1932, shortly after her father was arrested and sent to the Gulag with the other men involved in organizing their underground synagogue.
The mother left the house and Theresa taking almost nothing with her, headed for the train station, intending to leave home forever.
"[14] In 1932 she moved to Krasnodar, where she was assigned to beginning her postulancy under Sisters Magdalina Krylevslaya and Joanna Gotovtseva, and was tonsured as a Dominican nun with the name Teresa.
Kugel was later to recall Sister Magdalina, who had charge over her spiritual formation, as, "strict in the fulfillment of the Rule and Constitution of the Community", but also as, "a woman of extraordinary goodness and warmth.
"[17] In what the NKVD called "The Case of the Counterrevolutionary Terrorist-Monarchist Organization", Mother Catherine Abrikosova, Theresa Kugel, and all their fellow nuns stood accused of forming a "terrorist organization", plotting to assassinate Joseph Stalin, overthrow the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, and restore the House of Romanov as a constitutional monarchy in concert with "international fascism" and "Papal theocracy".
The NKVD further alleged that the nuns' terrorist activities were directed by Bishop Pie Eugène Neveu, the Vatican's Congregation for the Oriental Churches, and Pope Pius XI.
Whenever possible, both sisters attended the Masses offered by Wehrmacht military chaplains and knelt at the Communion Rail alongside German soldiers who were fully aware of their Jewish ancestry.
[19] Many years later, Secular Tertiary Ivan Lupandin asked Nora Rubashova why one of the Catholic military chaplains, whom she jokingly called a Hochdeutsch for his staunch belief in German nationalism, never reported her or Sister Theresa's Jewishness to the Gestapo or the SS.
"[20] After Maloyaroslavets was liberated by Red Army, Sister Theresa Kugel, despite her Jewishness, was arrested by the NKVD on charges of collaboration with Nazi Germany.
Sister Theresa was declared "psychologically incompetent" and, on 17 September, she was sent for involuntary treatment to a special hospital run by the MVD in Kazan.
[23] She moved to Vilnius and, while working as a cleaning woman and later as a nurse, Sister Theresa became the driving force in the monastic revival of the Dominican community.
[31] Soon after her death, her fellow Soviet Jewish convert and former spiritual protege Georgii Friedman, was accepted into an illegal seminary, attended, and graduated.