Raphael of Brooklyn, was bishop of the Russian Orthodox Church, auxiliary bishop of Brooklyn, vicar of the Northern-American diocese, and head of the Antiochian Syrian Christian mission. He is best known for having been first Eastern Orthodox bishop of America, for his staunch critiques of ethnophyletism, exclusivism and Greek nepotism in the Eastern Orthodox Church, as well as being precursor to the Arab Orthodox Movement and being among the first to integrate the Eastern Orthodox Church into multimedia with the first-ever published Eastern Orthodox magazine.

The Eastern Orthodox Church, officially the Orthodox Catholic Church, and also called the Greek Orthodox Church or simply the Orthodox Church, is the second-largest Christian church, with approximately 230 million baptised members. It operates as a communion of autocephalous churches, each governed by its bishops via local synods. The church has no central doctrinal or governmental authority analogous to the head of the Catholic Church. Nevertheless, the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople is recognised by them as primus inter pares, a title formerly given to the patriarch of Rome. As one of the oldest surviving religious institutions in the world, the Eastern Orthodox Church has played an especially prominent role in the history and culture of Eastern and Southeastern Europe.