Jewish Rabbi of Gaza

 The Jewish history of Gaza is as complex and intriguing as one of its most famous sons – Rabbi Ohana, who had tea with the king of Egypt, advised a Muslim cleric, met with Jewish assassins, introduced Hebrew education in New York, and became Chief Rabbi of Haifa.

Rabbi Nissim Binyamin Ohana served as the last Chief Rabbi of Gaza in the early 20th century. In many ways his fascinating life story illuminates lesser-known corners of the dramatic history of his generation and of the Land of Israel.

From Algeria to Jerusalem and beyond

Nissim was born in Médéa, Algeria, in 1881 to Mazal and Rabbi Masoud (Gad) Ohana. Rabbi Masoud, the city’s chief rabbi, was known for his knowledge of Kabbalah and his love for the Land of Israel.

When Nissim was just four years old, his family moved from North Africa to Israel, settling in Jerusalem. Nissim was a student at the Kol Yisrael Haverim (Alliance Israélite Universelle) school, the first modern educational institution of its kind in the city.

 At age 18, Nissim began intensive yeshiva studies. Within just three years, he was formally ordained as a rabbi by the Rishon Lezion (Sephardi Chief Rabbi of Israel) Rabbi Yaakov Shaul Elyashar, Rabbi Haim Moshe Elyashar, and the Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi of Jerusalem, Rabbi Shmuel Salant. A year later, at age 22, he married Miriam, a daughter of a later Sephardi Chief Rabbi, Rabbi Nachman Betito.

Rabbi Nissim Binyamin Ohana

It was in 1907 that Rabbi Nissim Ohana began serving as the Chief Rabbi of Gaza. From a historical perspective, he was adding his link to a very ancient chain.

The Jewish community of Gaza

Jews have lived in Gaza since at least the Second Century BCE, though mention of the region and its relation to the Land of Israel extends back to the Bible. It was described as inhabited by the Philistines, who were a constant source of aggression against bordering Jewish territories – specifically, Dan and Benjamin. Eventually, however, the region was conquered and administered by the Hasmonean king, Jonathan, in 145 BCE and then destroyed 48 years later by a successor, Alexander Yannai.

It was under the Hasmoneans that a Jewish community was established in Gaza. That community, like many others in the Land of Israel, had periods of flourishing and of failure, destruction at the hands of enemies and economic decline.

The Talmud (Sotah 20b) references a sage of the Tannaitic period, 10-220 CE, named Rabbi Elazar ben Yitzchak of Kfar Darom. That town, a place later called “Darum” by the Arab-Muslim invaders of 634, has been identified as the modern-day Deir El-Balah in the central Gaza Strip.

 Byzantine mosaic of King David in the ancient Gaza synagogue (Dr. Avishai Teicher, Wikipedia)

Documents from the Cairo Genizah indicate that a Jewish community existed in Gaza during the period following the Arab-Muslim conquest, although it may have been abandoned by the time the Crusaders took over the region (1099 CE). In 1187, the Crusaders conceded Gaza to the Caliphate, which was in turn driven out of the region by invading Mongols in 1260. However, that very same year the Mamluks – rebel slave-soldiers who established their own Muslim Sultanate in Egypt – pushed back the Mongolians.

As noted in contemporary testimonies by both Jews and non-Jews, there was once again a notable Jewish presence in Gaza during the Mamluk rule (1250–1517). For example, the banker Rabbi Meshulam of Tuscany, who visited Gaza in 1481, wrote, “There are sixty Jewish homeowners with a beautiful, small synagogue, vineyards, fields and houses, and they have already started making new wine.”

From 1620 to 1625, Gaza had a chief rabbi who has earned a permanent place in many Jewish communities with his poetic ode to Shabbat – Yah Ribbon Olam, which is sung at Shabbat tables around the world. Rabbi Yisrael ben Moshe Najara, born in Damascus, was an incredibly prolific writer, poet and scholar. He was succeeded as Chief Rabbi of Gaza by his son, Moshe, who was a poet in his own right.

In contrast, 1600s Gaza was also home to some followers of the false messiah Shabtai Zvi, including the infamous Natan who proclaimed Gaza to be the “holy city” in place of Jerusalem.

From Napoleon to Wissotzky

For the next 150 years, the Jewish community in Gaza grew and flourished, eventually seeing the short-lived conquest of their region by Napoleon Bonaparte in 1799. By 1801, the Ottomans and the British defeated French forces and the Ottomans took control of Gaza under Grand Vizier Kör Yusuf Ziya Pasha. The region then came under Muhammad Ali, the de facto independent ruler of Egypt, in the 1830s.

During this period, from Napoleon’s conquest to the rule of Muhammad Ali, the Jewish community shrunk to nothing. This may have been due to a plague that followed the French troops into the region, Muhammad Ali’s aggressive policies, the general pressures caused by the geopolitical instability of the time, or all of the above.

However, a small renaissance began in 1885 at the instigation of Kolonymus Ze’ev Wissotzky of Kovno, founder of the Wissotzky Tea company and a supporter of the proto-Zionist Hibbat Zion movement for renewed Jewish agriculture in the Land of Israel. By the early 1900s, there was once again an active Jewish community in Gaza.

 

Kolonymus Ze’ev Wissotzky

In 1910, “relations between Arabs and Jews are very good, and no Jew has ever suffered in Gaza for being a Jew,” according to a newsletter of the Zionist Hapoel Hatzair movement.

Rabbi Ohana in Gaza

It was into this old-new community that Rabbi Nissim Ohana arrived. And he wasted no time in making his mark.

Noting that Jews who passed away were being transported by donkey to Hebron for burial, Rabbi Ohana raised funds to establish a local Gazan Jewish cemetery. He also saw to the construction of a mikveh (ritual bath) for women and an elementary Jewish school (a Talmud Torah).

Rabbi Ohana’s school was unusual in that its exclusive language of instruction was Hebrew and emphasis was placed on knowledge of the Bible. He brought teachers from Jerusalem to ensure the children had a quality education and Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, a pivotal figure in the birth of modern spoken Hebrew, visited the school to pay his respects.

But the Talmud Torah was not the most unusual of Rabbi Ohana’s activities in early 20th-century Gaza.

Torah lessons with the Mufti

The Mufti of Gaza at the time, Sheikh Abdullah El-Alami, was faced with a troubling religious challenge. Christian missionaries had established a hospital in Gaza City where, alongside impartial and necessary medical care, they were preaching the gospel to a somewhat captive audience. (This may have been Al-Ahli Arab Hospital, established in 1882 by the Church Missionary Society of the Anglican Church and still operating in Gaza today.)

Rabbi Ohana described the situation and the subsequent surprising turn of events in the introduction to a book he published in 1959. In Rabbi Ohana’s own words:

… Among these [tracts handed out by the missionaries] was a book called ‘A Word of Truth,’ in which they proved that the Quran is a collection of material from the Torah, the Prophets and Talmudic stories, rather than – as they [Muslims] are told – prophesy of the prophet Muhammad.

The mufti of Gaza, Sheikh Abdullah El-Alami wanted to prove to the missionaries that the Quran is, after all, true, as what it says is found in the Torah, the Prophets and Talmudic stories, contrary to the verses found in the New Testament and the verses they brought in support of Jesus, which do not apply to him and do not prophesize about him in any way at all.

That mufti turned to me. And he visited me twice a week in my home, regularly bringing me questions about all the chapters and verses found in the New Testament, and demanding that I give him clear answers from the Bible itself.

He sat down and wrote out all the answers in Arabic.

I have preserved his handwritten notes to this day. And that is how this book was written, with clear proofs for all generations.

The book is called And Know How to Reply to a Heretic and it constitutes a detailed response to Christian missionary arguments. It is a classic of its kind – and it was the product of a conversation between a Sephardi Orthodox rabbi and a Muslim cleric in Gaza City over 100 years ago.

Rabbi Ohana after Gaza

Rabbi Ohana’s wife Miriam passed away in 1912 and he returned to Jerusalem, where, at the age of 30, he remarried. His second wife, Perla Chanah, was the daughter of a well-known kabbalist named Rabbi Yitzchak Moshe Fereira.

 

A letter from Rabbi Ohana being auctioned

Rabbi Ohana was then invited to the United States in 1913 to serve as a rabbi for the Syrian-Jewish community in New York. Much as he had done in Gaza, the rabbi introduced the study and everyday use of Hebrew in the community’s religious school.

Within two years, Rabbi Ohana returned to Jerusalem. But it was to be a short stay, as World War I had broken out and the ruling Ottomans ordered all “foreigners” to leave. The rabbi had been born in Algeria and held a French passport, which led to his expulsion to Egypt.

The Ohana family briefly relocated to Alexandria, but just six months later he was chosen by the Egyptian rabbinate to serve as Chief Rabbi of Malta. He fulfilled that role for five years before being called back to Egypt to serve as the Chief Rabbi of Port Said in 1920.

In 1921, he continued his tradition with the opening of a Hebrew-language school, Zichron Moshe, which was also the first Jewish school in Port Said. Zionist leader Chaim Weitzmann and Itamar Ben Avi, son of Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, were guests of honor at the cornerstone-laying ceremony.

Rabbi Ohana became a recognized figure among the Egyptian ruling class and was invited several times to tea with Fuad I, king of Egypt. In 1935, the rabbi was again called upon take up a new position, this time as the head of the Cairo Rabbinical Court and Deputy Chief Rabbi of Egypt.

In a 2024 interview, one of Rabbi Ohana’s nine children, Moshe, revealed that his father had met with Eliyahu Hakim and Eliyahu Beit Zuri, members of the LEHI Zionist underground group, before their assassination of the British Lord Moyne. As Secretary of State for the Colonies, Moyne was the highest-ranking UK official in the Middle East at the time and responsible for enforcing restrictions on Jewish immigration to Israel and land transfers to Jews. The rabbi tried to dissuade the two young men from their act of vengeance, but was unsuccessful and on November 6, 1944, they ambushed and killed Moyne near his Cairo home.

After Hakim and Beit Zuri were arrested and sentenced to death, Rabbi Ohana met with them in prison and said the traditional deathbed Jewish confession with them. According to Moshe, his father was horrified by the experience, lost his voice, and did not fully recover for several years.

In 1947, Rabbi Ohana took up his last rabbinical appointment. This time in the Land of Israel, as Chief Sephardi Rabbi of Haifa and its environs.

According to Moshe, the Ohana family adapted easily to life in Israel – troubled only by the British occupiers – and built up a new community comprised mostly of immigrants from Egypt. However, the rabbi was called upon to fulfill a sadly familiar duty when he met with three imprisoned members of the ETZEL resistance organization – Yaakov Weiss, Avshalom Habib and Meir Nakar – who were slated to be executed by British authorities. The three men were hanged on July 29, 1947.

Rabbi Ohana saw the foundation of the State of Israel in 1948 and continued serving as Chief Rabbi of Haifa for many years. In 1962, at the age of 80, he passed away and was buried in the Haifa cemetery in a traditional Sephardic ceremony that was attended by a massive crowd of mourners.

Gaza after Rabbi Ohana

The Jewish community of Gaza continued to exist after Rabbi Ohana’s departure until 1921, when the Jews fled as a precaution in the wake of Arab riots elsewhere in the Land of Israel. They returned shortly afterwards, when the situation calmed down, but further nationwide Arab riots and massacres in 1929 led to the complete evacuation of Gaza’s Jews.

Another attempt to revive the Jewish community in Gaza took place in 1946, with the establishment of a religious kibbutz called Kfar Darom. In 1948, during the Israeli War of Independence, Kfar Darom was conquered and destroyed by Egyptian forces.

After the 1967 Arab-Israeli Six Day War, when Gaza came under Israeli control, Kfar Darom was reestablished and became part of the Gush Katif bloc of settlements. The revenant Jewish community of Gaza came under incessant attack by Arab Gazans starting in the 1990s, with the implementation of the Oslo Accords. This eventually led to the Disengagement Plan of 2005 and yet another evacuation of all the Jews of Gaza, this time by the Israeli government itself.

A post-script

The late economist, author and columnist Steven Plaut – who was married to a granddaughter of Rabbi Ohana – wrote in 2009 that a “grandson of the [1900’s] mufti of Gaza is today a leading Hamas terrorist, and has served as the Hamas representative in Damascus.”

Plaut was most likely referring to a Hamas co-founder Imad Khalil Al-Alami, based on the terrorist’s last name and his Gazan origins. On January 30, 2018, Al-Alami died in Gaza from a gunshot wound to the head. It remains a mystery whether he accidentally shot himself or was eliminated in an internal Hamas feud.

In either case, Al-Alami’s death is a fitting metaphor for what Hamas has wrought for all the Arabs of Gaza in the wake of the war it launched on October 7, 2023.

What the future holds for that strip of land remains to be seen, but the current conflict occasioned a powerful reminder of its complex and tumultuous history. IDF soldiers in Gaza came across the site of a synagogue established in 508 CE – later destroyed by Arab-Muslim invaders in the 7th century – and briefly renewed Jewish prayer there as they pressed on in the struggle to defend our people.

Click here to read: Gaza’s History with Israel and Jews.

Written in memory of:

IDF Master Sergeant (res.) Eliyahu Meir Ohana, 28, of Haifa, who was killed on 10 Tevet 5784 (December 23, 2023) while serving in Gaza.

IDF Sgt. Ariel Ohana, 19, of Kibbutz Revadim, who was killed on 23 Tishrei 5784 (October 8, 2023) while defending Kibbutz Be’eri during the murderous Gazan assault on the village.

And with the hope of seeing the immediate release of:

Yosef-Haim Ohana (Yosef Haim ben Miriam), 24, who was abducted by Gazans on October 7, 2023, after heroically helping people who were wounded during the terrorist onslaught get to ambulances.

Featured painting above: Gaza, 1839, by David Roberts