Klymentiy Sheptytsky: The Monk Who Hid Jewish Children During the Holocaust - Then Died in a Soviet Prison

Klymentiy Sheptytsky: The Monk Who Hid Jewish Children During the Holocaust - Then Died in a Soviet Prison

Today I want to find out a little about Klymentiy Sheptytsky, a Ukrainian Catholic monk and priest who helped to protect Jewish people during the Holocaust and later died as a prisoner of the Soviet Union.

Klymentiy was born Kazimierz Maria Szeptycki on the 17th of November 1869 in Prylbychi, near Lviv, which was then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

He came from a prominent Polish-Ruthenian noble family and was the sixth of seven sons, although two of his brothers died young. His older brother, Andrey Sheptytsky, would later become the Metropolitan Archbishop and head of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church.

Klymentiy was highly educated. He studied in Kraków, Munich and Paris before earning a doctorate in law from the Jagiellonian University in 1892.

For a while, his life was very different from the one he would go on to choose. He helped to manage his family’s estates and became involved in politics, even serving in the Austrian parliament from 1900.

After leaving politics, Klymentiy became drawn towards religious life.

In 1911, he entered a Benedictine monastery in Germany. He later joined the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church and became a member of the Studite monastic community, taking the religious name Klymentiy.

He was ordained as a priest on the 28th of August 1915 and eventually became an important leader within the Studite monasteries.

Following the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, Lviv and the surrounding region came under German occupation. Jewish communities faced persecution and deportation.

Klymentiy worked closely with his brother Andrey to help save Jewish people.

Studite monasteries were used as places of refuge, and Jewish children were among those secretly hidden within religious communities. At the Univ monastery, Jewish boys could sometimes be hidden among the monks and the other young people living there.

Klymentiy helped to organise this network of protection and was directly involved in sheltering people whose lives were in danger.

Among those who survived with the help of the Sheptytsky brothers were Kurt Lewin and David Kahane, both of whom later wrote about their experiences.

When Soviet forces returned to the region in 1944, the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church faced renewed persecution.

Klymentiy became one of the most senior remaining leaders of the Church after many other clergy were arrested.

On the 5th of June 1947, Soviet authorities arrested him.

He was imprisoned and pressured to abandon his allegiance to the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, but he refused.

Klymentiy was eventually sentenced to eight years in prison.

He never completed the sentence.

On the 1st of May 1951, at the age of 81, Klymentiy Sheptytsky died in Vladimir Central Prison in the Soviet Union.

In 1995, Yad Vashem honoured him as Righteous Among the Nations for risking his life to help save Jewish people during the Holocaust.

Six years later, on the 27th of June 2001, Pope John Paul II beatified Klymentiy during a visit to Lviv.

Klymentiy Sheptytsky lived through two brutal occupations, but continued to protect others and remain faithful to his beliefs.