Nora Rubashova

Nora Rubashova (12 March 1909 – 12 May 1987) was a Belarusian Catholic nun who converted from Judaism to the Russian Greek Catholic Church. Her monastic name was Catherine.

Biography
Nora Rubashova was born in Minsk, Belarus, in a wealthy Orthodox Jewish family. In April 1926, under the influence of her high school teacher Tamara Sapozhnikova, she converted to Catholicism of the Byzantine Rite and took vows as a nun of the community of Sisters founded by Mother Catherine Abrikosova. Rubashova adopted the monastic name Catherine after Catherine of Siena.

According to Fr. Georgii Friedman, Rubashova's parents were heartbroken by her conversion and entrance into the Dominican Order. Her father, though, eventually came to terms with the fact. He used to joke whenever his daughter visited along with her fellow nuns, "Here come my in-laws!"

She studied at the Faculty of History and Philology of Moscow State University. Rubashova was a parishioner of Fr. Sergei Solovyov, who offered the Divine Liturgy in the Old Church Slavonic liturgical language at a side altar inside what is now the Immaculate Conception Cathedral in Moscow.

On 15 February 1931, she was arrested for belonging to the Russian Greek Catholic Church. On August 18, 1931 she was sentenced to 5 years of labor camps in the Mariinsky District, was released in 1936 and sent into exile in Michurinsk. In 1937, she left for Maloyaroslavets, where she joined the sisters, the remains of Anna Abrikosova's Dominican community. In May 1944 Rubashova traveled to the New Shulba near Semipalatinsk, to help sister Stephanie Gorodets who was there in exile. In 1947, together with Sister Stephanie she returned to Maloyaroslavets, and in summer of 1948 moved to Kaluga. On 30 November 1948, she was re-arrested for belonging to the Russian Catholic Church and, on 29 October 1949, was sentenced to 15 years of labor camps. Rubashova was sent to Vorkuta Gulag and, in 1954, to Karlag, staying there until May 1956. After her release from the Gulag, Rubashova went to Moscow. Mother Stephania Gorodets soon joined her and they lived together in a small flat in a communal apartment building near the University Station of the Moscow metro. Nora Rubashova got a job at the State Historical Library, where she worked until retirement.

She attended the Church of Saint Louis, and united around her the surviving community of Russian Catholics. Her room became a meeting place for the sisters and the spiritual center of the new community, which later attracted young people, Moscow State University students, and Soviet dissidents. Visitors included the poet Arseny Tarkovsky, Sergey Averintsev, Anna Godiner, and Nobel Prize winning novelist and historian Alexander Solzhenitsyn.

The community arranged clandestine offerings of the Byzantine Rite Divine Liturgy beginning from October 1979 by an underground Greek-Catholic priest from Leningrad, Fr. Georgii Friedman.

The May 1981 attempt on the life of Pope John Paul II by Mehmet Ali Ağca was devastating for Rubashova, who often prayed afterwards to the Sacred Heart for the Pope's healing and protection.

In her final years, Rubashova rejoiced in the beginning of glasnost and perestroika, but often said cautiously and in Gulag slang about Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev, "I can believe any beast, but as for him -- I'll wait a bit."

Towards the end of her life, Rubashova often confided in fellow Dominican tertiary Anna Godiner, "I am alone a lot, and I simply sit and timidly talk with God."

Sister Nora Rubashova died on 12 May 1987 in Moscow, Russia, and was buried at the Khovanskoye cemetery near Moscow.