Educator, modern writer, and translator of liturgical texts into English. He was born an orphan in Miden (his father perished in a storm on his way to purchase a sack of wheat from a nearby village while his mother was pregnant with him). His mother died a few hours after giving birth to him, after which his grandmother took care of him. His family immigrated to Palestine after World War I. After a rough childhood, his family entrusted him to the care of St. Mark’s Monastery in 1925. There he studied Syriac under Dolabani. Barsoum published a small pedagogical reader at the age of fifteen, and taught at the Syr. Orth. schools of Jerusalem, Bethlehem, and Amman. During World War II, he worked as an interpreter for the British Government for the Assyrians who were then deported from Iraq. After the Arab-Israeli war of 1948, Barsoum became a refugee for the third time and lived in Bethlehem. In 1955 he immigrated to Jordan and in 1966 to the USA. In 1984, he went on a pilgrimage to his homeland Ṭur ʿAbdin with Athanasios Yeshuʿ Samuel. He died in Los Angeles in 1996. His family established a small library to contain his library at St. Ephrem’s Cathedral, Burbank. His works include a pedagogical reader (Jerusalem, 1927); translations into English of the orders of baptism, matrimony, and burial (1974), and thirteen Anaphoras (1991); editions, with English translation, of a short daily prayer book (1993), and a prayer book for the clergy (1993). His other writings remain unpublished.