The First Priests

By the early 1900s, the number of Suryoye in North America increased, thus needed a priest to serve them. The first priest to be ordained specifically for North America was Fr. Hanna Koorie. He was ordained on May 20, 1907, by Mor Ivanios Elias Halloulei, Bishop of Jerusalem. Fr. Koorie must have served the entire immigrant communities and must have travelled between the NY/NJ area and New England. It is unlikely that he was able to serve the communities in Canada and Detroit. (Parenthetically, Patriarch Peter had sanctioned in 1892 the consecration of a Roman Catholic convert, one Joseph René Vilatte, as “Mor Timotheos, Metropolitan of North America.” Vilatte, however, did not have any contact with the immigrant community, and seems to have lost touch with the mother church shortly after.) During the 1910, a monk named Gabriel Anto visited Canada for six months, and he administered to the spiritual needs of the community there. In 1922, Fr. Koorie’s brother, Fr. Nahum Koorie, also arrived in the US.
By the late 1920s, the community had grown even more and the Patriarch at the time, Mor Ignatius Elias III, sent a Bishop to visit them. Mor Severus Aphrem (later to become Patriarch Aphrem I) consecrated in 1927 three churches: St. Mary in West New York, NJ (now Paramus, named after the Church of the Virgin in Diyarbak?r); St. Mary in Worcester, MA (now Shrewsbury, named after the Church of the Virgin in Kharput); and St. Aphrem in Central Falls, RI. He must have also consecrated deacons for the immigrant communities. Bishop Barsoum also visited the immigrants in Detroit and established a congregation for them. A few years later, a priest would arrive from Syria to serve them. Later on, a few of the families from Detroit would move to Jacksonville and Miami, FL.
On January 29, 1949, Mor Athanasius Yeshue Samuel, Archbishop of Jerusalem, arrived in the United States and began to tend to the families. Mor Athanasius had also brought with him the famous Dead Sea Scrolls in the hope of finding a buyer for them in the US. In 1949, Bishop Samuel consecrated a new Church for the parish in Rode Island, as the previous one was consumed by fire. During the same year, he consecrated the church of John Chrysostom in Detroit. Then Mor Samuel consecrated the first church in Canada in 1952, St. Ephrem, in Sherbrooke, Quebec.