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
](https://gedsh.bethmardutho.org/Mark-Monastery-of-St) in 1925. There he
studied Syriac under [
Dolabani
](https://gedsh.bethmardutho.org/Dolabani-Philoxenos-Yuhanon). Barsoum published a
small pedagogical reader at the age of fifteen, and taught at the Syr. Orth.
schools of [
Jerusalem
](https://gedsh.bethmardutho.org/Jerusalem), Bethlehem, and Amman. During World War II, he worked
as an interpreter for the British Government for the [Assyrians](https://gedsh.bethmardutho.org/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
](https://gedsh.bethmardutho.org/Tur-Abdin) with
[
Athanasios Yeshuʿ Samuel
](https://gedsh.bethmardutho.org/Samuel-Athanasios-Yeshu). 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 His other writings remain unpublished.