Elias Union, known as Russell Union in the secular world, is the President and CEO of R Union Enterprises which operates San Jose Candle Company and Union of All Icons in Jamestown, California.
Educated in the United States Air Force while serving in the Viet Nam war, after he was discharged from the service in 1968, Elias continued working in the field of electronics in Silicon Valley for 30 years, moving from manufacturing to engineering in semi-conductor equipment design and manufacturing.
In 1998 he bought San Jose Candle Company from a Serbian Orthodox owner who was finally ready to retire at age 82! Elias moved the company to the Sierra Nevada foothills into an 8,000 square foot warehouse. The business currently sells about 1 million beeswax prayer candles per year.
In 2019 the icon business that Elias had helped start in Ben Lomond in the early 1990's came to be relocated in the warehouse, next to the candle factory. This seemed like a small miracle!
After perfecting a process for mounting and coating the icons, Union of All Icons is ready to launch. We pray that you will be blessed by our icons and other products that we lovingly cover in prayer.
We have licensing agreements with our iconographers to ensure that they benefit from the sale of our products. For icons made from images in the public domain we are doing our best to donate a portion of the proceeds from the sales to entities tied to the source of the image.