Born in a Lithuanian Jewish family in Kaunas, Lithuania (known as Kovno at the time, or Kovne in Glazer's native Yiddish), his year of birth is not certain, and may have been either 1876 or 1878.

After the laws passed, he received authority from President Warren G. Harding to adopt five Romanian orphans, in order to provide them entry into the country.

[4] Unusual for an Eastern European-trained rabbi of the period, he had a secular education, which aided him in his positions in North America, and allowed him to write books in English for an American public.

[4][5] These undertakings created controversy with the establishment organizations, and their rabbi, Zvi Hirsch Cohen, who arranged for a newspaper article critical of Glazer.

Eventually, Glazer had enough, and moved back to the United States in 1918,[5] taking the rabbinate of Congregation Bikur Cholim of Seattle, Washington.

His first post there was rabbi of Beth Medrash Hagadol of Harlem, followed by Congregation Beth-El of Brooklyn in 1927, and finally the Maimonides Synagogue of Manhattan from 1930 until his death in 1938 of heart disease.

Mapping Work in Early Twentieth-Century Montreal: Rabbi Simon Glazer, Social Mobility, and the Jewish Community.