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Yihya Yitzhak Halevi

Mori Yiḥya Yitzḥak Halevi
Chief Rabbi of Yemen
Rabbi Yihya Yitzhak Halevi, Chief Rabbi of Yemen.jpg
Position Av Beit Din (1902–1932)
Organisation Rabbinic court at Sana'a
Personal details
Birth name יחיא יצחק הלוי
Born 1867
Sana'a
Died 1932
Sana'a
Buried Sana'a
Nationality Yemeni
Denomination Baladi-rite
Residence Sana'a
Father Moshe (Musa)
Children Shalom Yitzḥak Halevi, chief rabbi in Tel-Aviv
Occupation Ritual slaughterer, tanner
Profession Rabbi and Judge

Yiḥya Yitzḥak Halevi, son of Moshe (Musa) Yitzḥak Halevi (Hebrew: יחיא יצחק הלוי also commonly known as Mori Yiḥya Yitzḥak from the house of Yitzḥak Halevi) (1867 – 1932), was a Yemeni born rabbinical scholar who served as one of the last great scholars and chief jurists of the rabbinic court at Ṣan‘ā’, which post he held for nearly thirty years, a time interrupted only during the siege laid to the city (Dec. 1904—Jan. 1906) by loyal Yemeni forces under Imām Yaḥyā Ḥamīd ad-Dīn (1904—1948) in their bid to oust the Ottoman Turks who then controlled the city. The Rabbi, meanwhile, had fled with his family to Dhamar.

Yiḥya Yitzḥak Halevi was born in Ṣan‘ā’, the eldest of ten children born unto Musa Yitzḥak, a tanner of hides by profession, and a descendant of one of the city's more illustrious Jewish families. Yiḥya Yitzḥak received his early education from his maternal grandfather, the Rabbi and kabbalist Shalom Mansura, and was already knowledgeable in the laws of ritual slaughtering at the early age of eleven. In 1880, at the age of thirteen, he began to study the Talmud and the legal writings of the poskim, with other boys his own age, in the house of his grandfather, the said Rabbi Mansura, until his grandfather's death in 1883. Afterwards, he studied under the prominent scholars in the famous Maharitz synagogue in Ṣan‘ā’. The synagogue served at that time as the city's chief seat of learning. In the evenings, he would continue his studies in the midrashic school belonging to the great teacher, Rabbi Ḥayim Qoraḥ (d. 1914), where they studied Ein Yaakov and the Shulchan Arukh and their respective commentaries.

Around the age of seventeen he married his first wife, Saadah Khamri, who died after she had given birth to five children (two sons and three daughters), two of whom died in their youth. One of his two sons, Shalom Yitzḥak Halevi (b. 1891), immigrated to the British Mandate of Palestine in 1923 and became the Chief Rabbi of the Yemenite Jewish community in Tel-Aviv/Jaffa (1925 – 1961), serving also as the Av Beit-Din in a rabbinic court (1925 – 1956) in Tel-Aviv, and was an active member of the Chief Rabbinate Council in Jerusalem for nearly forty years. Yiḥya, not willing to remain a widower, took in marriage a second wife, Rumiyyah, the daughter of Suleiman Hibshush, by whom he had other children. As most scholars of his generation, he was trained in the laws of ritual slaughter of livestock such as prescribed in Jewish law and when later tasked with the public affairs and oversight of the community, he would ordain qualified ritual slaughterers of domesticated animals throughout the country, and periodically inspected them.


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