Rabbi Eliezer Bercuson

Maimonides School

March 5, 2019

Rabbi Eliezer Bercuson was born in Montreal and raised in Ottawa, Canada, where he grew up in the French-language public school system. He holds a Bachelor of Humanities in Philosophy and Classics from Carleton University in Ottawa. Upon graduation, he was an elementary school teacher in Lyon, France, and then a volunteer at Kvutzat Yavneh, a religious kibbutz near Ashdod. He is an alumnus of Yeshivat Hamivtar in Efrat. At Yeshiva University, he earned an M.A. in Jewish Philosophy from the Bernard Revel Graduate School of Jewish Studies and semikhah (Yoreh Yoreh) from the Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary. In a program run jointly by the Montefiore Endowment in London and Eretz Hemdah in Jerusalem, he is currently learning towards advanced judicial semikhah (Yadin Yadin). Rabbi Bercuson is a full-time member of the Judaic studies faculty at Maimonides School in Brookline, MA. At Maimonides, he is the Dean of the 9th Grade, a Talmud and Chumash teacher in the Middle School, and an instructor of a variety of Judaic subjects in the Upper School. He is an associate member of the Boston Beth Din and gives classes at synagogues all over the greater Boston area. Prior to moving to Boston in 2015, Rabbi Bercuson and his wife, Ilana, were the directors of the Orthodox Union’s Jewish Learning Initiative on Campus at Princeton University. In Princeton, NJ, he was the mara d’atra of an Orthodox community of over 100 individuals, including undergraduate and graduate students, professors, visiting scholars, and residents of the surrounding area. A naturalized American citizen, Rabbi Bercuson has proudly served in the U.S. Army Chaplain Corps, from which he was honorably discharged at the rank of First Lieutenant. Having been trained as a chaplain at St. Luke’s Hospital in New York, he is accredited in Clinical Pastoral Education (CPE), Level I. He has been a scholar-in-residence at synagogues in Chicago, Minneapolis, Atlanta, Memphis, Connecticut, and Riverdale, NY. He is, also, a certified shochet of birds. Rabbi Bercuson is an avid distance runner with a lifelong love of ice hockey. He has run in many road races, including one half-marathon with two particularly fierce competitors: his rebbe and his father. He resides in Boston with his wife and three children.