'āl-Qidīs Rafāʾīl min Brūklīn', born Raphael Hawaweeny;[3] Arabic: رفائيل الهواويني, romanized: Rafāʾīl Hawāwīnī; November 20, 1860 – February 27, 1915), was bishop of the Russian Orthodox Church, auxiliary bishop of Brooklyn, vicar of the Northern-American diocese, and head of the Antiochian Syrian[4] Christian mission.
[8] Afterwards, Father Raphael was sent to New York City in 1895 by Tsar Nicholas II of Russia to administer the local Orthodox Christian community which then included mainly Russian, Greek, Romanian and Arab immigrants, responding specifically to a request by local Arabic-speaking Orthodox Christians for a priest who could minister to them in their own language.
From 1903 onwards, after having been elected the "Syria-Arabian Vicariot of America", he began his notoriously ambitious missionary journey, wherein he adopted a semi-nomadic lifestyle, in which he was known to have travelled by foot, by horse, by donkey and by train among freighthopping tramps and hobos, even having gone so far as to extend his mission to Cuba and the Caribbean towards the end; during his travels, he organized his journey around letters he received from scattered Orthodox Christians in America, and would use them as a guideline for his travels, coming in-and-out of cities to perform spontaneous baptisms, marriages and blessings.
Bishop Raphael founded the official magazine of the Antiochian Orthodox Archdiocese, The Word, in 1905 in Arabic (الكلمة), and wrote many works of his own, most of which remain both untranslated and unpublished.
He is commemorated by the OCA on February 27, the anniversary of his death and by the Antiochian Orthodox Church on the first Saturday of November near the Synaxis of the Archangels Michael, Gabriel, Raphael and all the bodiless powers of heaven.