Hélène Arjakovsky-Klépinine

This article traces the life and path to sainthood of Father Dimitri Klepinin (1904-1944), a Russian Orthodox émigré priest canonized in 2004 by the Patriarchate of Constantinople. Written in the form of a biographical testimony by his daughter Hélène Arjakovsky-Klepinin, the text follows the stages of his spiritual and theological formation, from revolutionary Russia to the Saint Sergius Institute in Paris, by way of Belgrade and Prague. The central idea is that Father Dimitri's holiness was built through concrete action: welcoming the marginalized, resisting the Nazi occupation, and issuing false baptismal certificates to protect Jews. Arrested by the Gestapo in 1943 along with Mother Maria Skobtsova and their companions from Lourmel, he died at the Dora camp in February 1944. The article contributes to documenting the memory of Orthodox Christian resistance in occupied France.

This article examines the thought of Mother Maria Skobtsova on the fate of the Jewish people through an analysis of her poem *The Star of David* and her verse play *The Soldiers*, written in 1942 under the Nazi Occupation. The study, which draws on theological meditation and literary analysis, also reconstructs the history of the altered transmission of the poem, several stanzas of which were censored during its first posthumous publication in 1949. The central idea is that Mother Maria interprets antisemitic persecution as an eschatological sign calling both Christians to martyrdom and the Jewish people to recognize the Messiah. The contribution of the article is to show how this Russian Orthodox nun developed, drawing on Romans 11, an original theology of reconciliation between the Church and the Synagogue, anticipating a Jewish-Christian rapprochement grounded in shared suffering.