Sister Theresa Kugel, OP (1912, Orekhovo-Zuyevo, Moscow Governorate, Russian Empire – 2 December 1977, Vilnius, Lithuania), was a Dominican nun, a convert from Orthodox Judaism to the Russian Catholic Church, and a Gulag survivor. Her birth name was Minna Rahmielovna Kugel (Минна Рахмиэловна Кугель).
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. Her parents and siblings were later described as, "good and decent people, faithful to all the precepts of the Jewish religion." 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.[2] According to Fr. Georgii Friedman, a young Mina Kugel was a member of the Young Pioneers and the Komsomol.[3]
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 Krylevskoy. 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. Until this time, Mina Kugel had never before been exposed to Christianity.[4]
In 1930, Mina was staying with her uncle in Yaroslavl and undergoing treatment for pulmonary tuberculosis. Out of curiosity, she went into a local Roman Catholic parish while Fr. Josif Josiukas was offering a Solemn High Mass followed by Eucharistic Adoration. 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 left the church transformed into a completely different person.[5]
In 1931, Mina Kugel, who now desired only to become a Catholic, travelled to Moscow and stayed with her relatives. She was secretly baptized into the Russian Greek Catholic Church, with Nora Rubashova as her godmother, by the former Symbolist poet Fr. Sergei Solovyov. Mina Kugel took the Christian name of Theresa, in honor of St. Thérèse of Lisieux.[6] Many years later, her spiritual director, Fr. Georgii Friedman, would compare Mina Kugel's conversion story with those of André Frossard and Hermann Cohen.[7]
Kugel's illness was considered hopeless and the doctors had reportedly given up on her. 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.[8]
In 1932 she moved to Krasnodar, where she was tonsured a nun with the name Teresa.
On 6 October 1933 in Krasnodar she was arrested and taken to Moscow, where she was placed in Butyrskaya prison. On 19 February 1934 she was sentenced to 3 years in a labor camp. Kugel was released on 16 November 1935.
After December she lived in Bryansk and in October 1937 moved to Maloyaroslavets. During World War II Maloyarolavets was occupied by Nazi Germany and, along with fellow Soviet Jewish Sister Nora Rubashova, Sister Theresa survived the Holocaust in Russia by working as a nurse in a German military hospital. 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.[9]
Many years later, Secular Tertiary Ivan Lupandin asked Nora Rubashova why one of the Catholic 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. Rubashova replied, "Well, he was a Catholic priest. He was nationalistic, but not that nationalistic."[10]
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. According to Ivan Lupandin, the NKVD's logic was that Sister Theresa must have been a collaborator because, "how else could she have worked in a hospital and not been shot by the Nazis?"[11]
On 31 October 1942, she was declared guilty and sentenced to five years of "corrective labor" in Temlag for being a "socially dangerous element."[12]
She was released on 25 March 1947 and returned to live in Maloyaroslavets. In the autumn of next year she moved to Kaluga. On 3 April 1949 Kugel she was arrested on charges of espionage for the Vatican. On 2 July 1949 she refused to sign the indictment and accordingly fell victim of the Political abuse of psychiatry in the Soviet Union. 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. On 15 October 1952, Theresa Kugel was transferred to an ordinary psychiatric hospital and was finally released following the death of Joseph Stalin in 1953.[13]
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. She arranged for official invitations for the surviving sisters to come and live with her[14] inside a Khrushchyovka apartment building on Dzuku Street.
Georgii Friedman, a Soviet Jewish jazz musician and recent Catholic convert, first visited them in 1974 and found that the Sisters were being covertly ministered to by Dominican Friars visiting from the People's Republic of Poland and by Fr. Volodymyr Prokopiv, a fellow Gulag survivor and priest of the illegal and underground Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church.[15]
Friedman later recalled, "I remember how the atmosphere of quiet and peace in their quarters delighted me. On the walls hung large images of Saint Dominic and Saint Catherine of Siena. In the tiniest little chapel they had made an altar put of a dresser, and on the altar stood a crucifix. A lamp flickered in a beautiful vessel to show that the Blessed Sacrament was reserved there."[16]
Friedman also recalled, "Sister Teresa, sixty-two years old, was tall, stocky, and plain. Her face reflected a selfless faith. She was then still working as a nurse in the hospital."[17]
In 1977, Mina Kugel was hospitalized with terminal bladder cancer. Soon after, Frs. Georgii Friedman and Volydymyr Prokopiv arrived to visit her. Fr. Friedman later recalled, "From her frightfully changed, corpse-like face, her eyes looked upon me, radiant with love and joy. I quickly left the room because I was afraid I would begin to cry."[18]
When he returned, Fr. Friedman overheard Mina asking Father Prokopiv, "Father, why are they prolonging my sufferings with these pills?" Father Prokopiv bent over her and softly asked, "Do you not want to suffer a bit more for the sake of the salvation of souls?"[19]
According to Father Friedman, "'I do', she quietly answered, and thereafter not a single complaint fell from her lips."[20]
Mina Kugel died during surgery in Vilnius in 1977.[21]