Barsoum, Murad Ṣaliba (1912–1996) [Syr. Orth.]

Educator, modern writer, and translator of liturgical texts into English.

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 His other writings remain unpublished.