From: MSN NicknameEagle_wng  (Original Message)    Sent: 5/18/2005 4:10 AM
City Intends to Return Churches to Owners


By Irina Titova
STAFF WRITER
The St. Petersburg city government last week approved a bill that is intended to return to religious organizations their property that was nationalized after the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917.

Under the bill, religious buildings and those used for religious purposes, which are currently assigned to religious organizations for their permanent, rent-free use, will become the property of religious organizations.

The city owns 94 churches, synagogues, mosques and Buddhist temples and 29 other buildings that are used for religious purposes covered by the bill. The federal government owns 19 such buildings.

Governor Valentina Matviyenko said that the property will be returned to the religious organizations on request.

"This way we restore fairness and develop the legal basis for the return of the lands to religious confessions, which used to legally belong to them," Interfax quoted her saying.

Tatyana Prosvirina, spokeswoman for the city's property committee, said the new bill will be applicable to religious buildings of any confession in St. Petersburg. The religious buildings in question include not only churches but also other buildings such as prayer houses, bell houses, refectories, and so on, she added.

However, it is not clear yet when the new law will take effect, because it must first be considered by the city's Legislative Assembly, and no date to discuss it has been assigned yet.

Most of the property involved belongs to the Orthodox Church, but no spokesman was available on Monday.

A representative of Sea Cathedral of St. Nicholas the Miraclemaker, who didn't want to be identified, said City Hall's plan will be "very important for many churches," the former property of which belongs to the city.

St. Petersburg's Chief Rabbi, Menakhem Mendl Pevzner, said the bill is direly needed by all confessions.

"It's not only for historical fairness but also because of the modern needs of religious organizations, which need to develop and need more space for that," Pevzner said Monday.

The Jewish community wants several buildings returned.

One of those buildings is at 42 Ulitsa Dekabristov, which housed a Jewish school until 1937, but then was given to a city hospital, and later to an architectural bureau.

The synagogue wants to turn the building back into a Jewish school and to use it to house other Jewish public organizations, Pevzner said.

Another building is a former orphanage for Jewish children on Vasilevsky Island, which is now a residential home.

Pevzner said the bill serves the city's interests as well as religious organizations because the latter take care of youth and the elderly.

However, Olga Azikainen, secretary of Lutheran church of St. Maria, where Finns and Ingrians worship, said the bill will not help their church because it is federal property.

The problems of restoring religious property are vexed with all the changes that have taken place over the years during which other people and organizations occupied their premises.

Thus, the parish of St. Petersburg's Catholic St. Catherine's Church of Alexandria was very concerned this year when City Hall refused to return a building adjacent to the church on Nevsky Prospekt.

The church said it has a great need for the four-story building at 32-34 Nevsky Prospekt.

"We desperately need additional space to locate our Sunday school, library, hall for cultural meetings, room for charity activities, and space for a cultural inter-Christianity center," said Father Matchay, senior priest at the church, which is the biggest of five other city's catholic churches, in February.

"We also need more space to serve our pilgrims," he said.

Matchay said the building was erected by the Catholic Church in the 19th century, along with several other buildings surrounding it, which were part of a Catholic monastery.

After the Bolshevik Revolution the city's catholic parish lost all those buildings, including St. Catherine's church itself. Due to its location in the pre-revolutionary capital, it was considered Russian Catholics' mother church since the moment of its construction in 1783.

In 1992, the federal government returned St. Catherine's church, which covers 400 square meters, for lease.

Last August, Father Matchay wrote a letter to Matviyenko asking for the return of the neighboring building, which, according to him, houses several apartments, a fitness center, drivers' school, and offices. Some rooms were vacant.

The church didn't know if it could get the building as property or merely on a lease. Therefore it just asked for receiving the building back, he said.

However, in September the church received a reply signed by Vice Governor Yury Molchanov, which said that most of rooms in the building had already been bought by ZAO Preo Nezhiloi Fond.

Father Matchay said the church had addressed the city administration about the return of the building before, but nobody had asked them about their interest when the building was sold.

http://www.sptimesrussia.com/archive/times/1070/top/t_15734.htm