On May 30, it marked 100 years since the birth of Mother Elizabeth, known in the world as Duchess Elena Dmitrievna of Leuchtenberg.

She was born in 1922 in the ancestral castle of Zeon in Bavaria to an officer of the Russian Imperial Army, Duke Dmitry Georgievich of Leuchtenberg, and Duchess Ekaterina Alexandrovna of Leuchtenberg, née Arapova.

Elena's great-grandfather was Prince Nikolai Maximilianovich Romanovsky, the 4th Duke of Leuchtenberg, and her great-great-grandmother was Grand Duchess Maria Nikolaevna, the eldest daughter of Emperor Nicholas I.

Elena received a home education and then studied at a German boarding school. However, her parents decided to give her a Russian education, and after finishing the boarding school in 1938, they sent her to Yugoslavia to the Mariinsky Don Institute for Noble Maidens, evacuated from Novocherkassk in 1919 to Bila Tserkva.

A year later, the Leuchtenberg family was forced to leave Europe due to the onset of World War II and moved to Canada. Her knowledge of four languages proved useful in the fight against Nazism, and Duchess Elena Dmitrievna joined the naval intelligence service, rising to the rank of lieutenant.

After the war, Elena Dmitrievna worked as a secretary in various institutions in New York. In 1964, after the death of her brother, Duke Georgy Dmitrievich of Leuchtenberg, she moved to France and joined the Pokrovsky Convent in Bussy-en-Ot, taking monastic vows with the name Elizabeth in honor of the mother of John the Baptist. In the convent, she performed various duties, sang in the choir, and worked on publishing English translations of Orthodox liturgical texts.

In 1996, Mother Elizabeth visited Russia for the first time as part of a pilgrimage service, visiting Diveevo, Moscow, St. Petersburg, and Pskov. Later, she returned to her homeland several more times and even passed on several family relics.

Mother Elizabeth passed away after a long illness on November 10, 2013, at the Pokrovsky Convent and was buried in the convent cemetery. In 2015, a memorial plaque was installed in her memory on the family plot of the Dukes of Leuchtenberg near the ancestral castle of Zeon.