It’s Tuesday afternoon, and a few dozen of the faithful members of St. Mary and St. Antonios Coptic Orthodox Church in Ridgewood, Queens, are singing in the liturgy during observation of the Great Lent, the 55 days of prayer and fasting that precede Orthodox Easter, on May 5. The women wear white lace coverings over their hair, and smoky-sweet incense wafts through the air as the ancient melodies fill the icon-rich sanctuary. As at all services here, a screen projects the words being sung or spoken in three languages simultaneously: English, Arabic and Coptic.
Until recently, the screens had mostly helped the congregation follow along with the liturgical language, which few people know these days, and aided second- and third-generation Egyptian-Americans with weak Arabic skills.
But now they serve a new purpose: translation for the hundreds of new church members who do not speak a word of English.
Ever since the 2011 revolution that toppled President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt and ushered in the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood, Copts — Egypt’s Orthodox Christian minority — have been flooding out of the country and into the United States. The New York area has been a major gateway for these new arrivals, and churches in Brooklyn, Queens and Jersey City have had their rosters swell accordingly. Within a few months of the revolution, so many people had arrived from Egypt that the membership of St. Mary and St. Antonios had doubled, to about 1,000 families, and the church has not been quite the same since.
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nytimes.com]
