On a recent Wednesday afternoon, Rabbi Eliezer Lawrence is laying a sterile drape over a stone-top table in an Upper Saddle River, New Jersey, kitchen, preparing for his final bris of the day. Pickles, chopped salads, and meat pastries — traditional for Bukharan Jews, a Central Asia community — are set up in the dining room. Two older men, speaking Russian, hunch over a chessboard as the family walks around them.

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Tools in place, Lawrence begins stage-managing with the self-assurance of a former theater kid. He ushers the mother and grandmother to the end of the room; he directs the sandek — the holder of the child during the ritual circumcision — to sit on a chair next to him. Lawrence signals for the baby to be brought in. “The bris,” he tells the family, which has circled him, “marks a child’s entrance into the Jewish community as a blessing.”

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Lawrence has already seen much of this community today, crisscrossing the tristate area in a hectic schedule that has become normal for one of the city’s most in-demand mohels. At 8:30 a.m., he led a bris at the Upper East Side’s Park Avenue Synagogue, where 20th-century Judaica was on display and there was a made-to-order omelet station. Then he hopped in his tiny white Scion iQ and zipped down to a Hudson Yards skyscraper for a bris held in a penthouse room that overlooked the Vessel. The challenge there was a rowdy sandek who interrupted the ceremony with off-color comments. But he kept the ritual moving. “You have to have a certain constitution to be able to do all of this interdisciplinary work,” he says, “being an armchair sociologist, space-maker, pastoral presence, and expert surgical practitioner.”

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Few rabbis are ever able to work as a full-time mohel. At 35 years old, in the eighth year of his career, Lawrence is one of them. He’s earned a certain kind of fame, performing five to ten brises per week, and makes good money doing it. While he won’t divulge his rate (and offers a sliding scale), Lawrence says mohels can receive up to $1,800 per ceremony. “I do believe there was divine intervention,” he says of his rise. “I can’t take full credit.”

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Lawrence grew up in a traditional family in Teaneck, New Jersey. After graduating from Columbia with degrees in linguistics and Yiddish, he received rabbinical training at Yeshivat Ma’aleh Gilboa in Israel, where he was ordained. His mohel aspirations began there. “It’s the oldest clerical role in the Jewish community,” he says. The role allows him to say “yes” to everyone: LGBTQ+ families, adults interested in converting, the couple who have not gone to synagogue in years.

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After Israel, Lawrence did a postgraduate clinical apprenticeship at the London School of Circumcision before returning to the U.S., ready to work. Lawrence went to the grave of the Rebbe — the revered Jewish leader who oversaw New York’s Chabad-Lubavitch Hasidic community for more than four decades — in Queens and prayed for his first solo gig and for a second job to soon follow. That month, he performed a bris for a Bukharan and Moroccan family that had found him online and was planning a bris on the scale of a bar mitzvah (there was a DJ booked). Lawrence sees divinity in the fact that the family had twin boys; he had a second job mere moments after the first.

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On his website, familymohel.com, Lawrence calls himself “NY, NJ and CT’s Highest Rated Mohel.” “It is, I think, legally defined as puffery,” he admits. But it is not far off.

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Lawrence has more five-star reviews on Google than any of his competitors and has broken into a tough market with record speed. He performs hundreds of brises per year, from South Orange, New Jersey, to Flatbush. The rabbi has even done a handful of destination brises — in the Bahamas, Portugal, and Boston. But he’s a family man who isn’t interested in wandering too far from his Riverdale home.

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Lawrence’s popularity is in part thanks to his proximity to a big name from near his hometown: Philip Sherman, the legendary motorcycle-riding mohel who claimed to have performed 26,000 brises in his career. Sherman, who died in 2023, was well known enough to book a job as a judge on Orange Is the New Black and a bit part on The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. He was a character, and a character actor, who easily bridged the divide between the secular and observant worlds. He could lead Reform Jews in ceremonies, tell a few jokes, and still be home in time to fully observe the Sabbath. “He was the king,” Lawrence says.

Sherman let Lawrence shadow him. And it was from Sherman that the younger rabbi learned the basics of the job. Sherman set the bar for the “volume and reach” of a tristate mohel, he says.

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“People said to me, ‘You could be the next him,’ ” Lawrence says of Sherman.

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He is aware that sometimes bris attendees are looking for someone who is mostly a comedic entertainer. But Lawrence describes himself as “a pedagogue at heart.” He knows that attendees won’t understand every Hebrew part of the ceremony, but Lawrence aims to offer a meaningful experience, no matter the gathering’s level of Jewish education. “I don’t have to understand every part of a play to walk away and feel like it touched me in some way,” he says.

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Much of Lawrence’s business comes from word of mouth. During an Upper West Side bris, I saw a man in a blue button-down and glasses nudge his husband to point out the rabbi, seeming to note This is the guy everyone uses. After the service, the man approached Lawrence to ask about booking far in advance and about the rules for converting their baby if their surrogate was not Jewish.

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These are challenging times for mohels, who are competing for slices of a niche business. Most circumcisions are performed in hospitals, and according to a 2025 Johns Hopkins study, the surgeries are in decline. Circumcision rates in U.S. hospitals are down from 54.1 percent in 2012 to 49.3 percent in 2022. Religious norms are changing, too. More women are becoming mohels, and some families are choosing to hire mohels who have trained as OB/GYNs and pediatricians.

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Part of Lawrence’s balancing act as an ordained authority of the ritual is to unite a spiritual leader’s sincerity with an aggressive approach to his industry, which he calls “cutthroat.” Mohels are generally not allowed to train in the cities or towns where they plan to practice, in order to keep them from taking the work of their instructors. And they don’t tend to be particularly chummy with colleagues because of the competition. Lawrence says that posts in mohel group chats stay strictly professional — mostly about different surgical approaches.

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To survive as a mohel, Lawrence has to be self-promotional. There are tangible downsides to making himself so public. Anti-circumcision activists dox him, perverts ask if he’ll “check” on their circumcision, and kids prank-call him. But Lawrence spends more time wrestling with fame itself.

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“Every mohel is inclined to narcissism,” he says. “But in any business, you’re telling a story. There are personalities out there who end up fully believing the mythology of being ‘the best.’ I think that leads to a plateau. I’m careful about my desire for growing and having as much humility as I can, alongside the fact that I’m eight years into my practice and major synagogues in New York have me at the top of their list.”