The Ohel of Rabbi Haim Huri

The story

In the Old Cemetery of Beersheba stands a large ohel, erected over the grave of Rabbi Haim Huri. Worshippers visit it throughout the whole year, and on the day of his hillula thousands of people come to it. Rabbi Haim Huri (1885 – 25 Iyar 5717, 26 May 1957) was the rabbi of Gabès, in the south of Tunisia, and one of the most prominent among the rabbis of the Jewry of Tunisia in the twentieth century. He was born in the Diguet quarter on the island of Djerba — Hara Sghira, the small quarter — the only son of Avraham-Zaken and of Mabirkha. In his youth he studied with Rabbi Moshe Zaken Mazuz and with Rabbi Fradji Alush, and at the same time worked in a printing house. At the age of eighteen he was ordained to the rabbinate and appointed a teacher and a prayer leader in the community of Gabès; afterwards he returned to Diguet and served there as rabbi and as a rabbinical judge with his companion Rabbi Makhluf Idan. In 1926, when the rabbi of Gabès, Yitzhak Hai Bukhobza, was appointed Chief Rabbi and head of the rabbinical court of Libya, Rabbi Huri was called to fill his place. In Gabès he founded a yeshiva by the name “Torah VeHaim” and institutions of charity and kindness, engaged in education and in the printing of books and their distribution, and a part of them he translated himself into Judeo-Arabic. In 1917 he was one of the founders of the association “Ateret Tzion”, which engaged in the study of Hebrew and with the work of the land as preparation for immigration to the Land of Israel, and he encouraged the immigration of the Jews of Tunisia and worked for it many years. In 1954, at the age of seventy, he himself immigrated and settled in Beersheba. He lived in it three years and died in it. His place in Gabès was filled by his disciple, Rabbi Shimon Maimon. In 1981 the yeshiva “Rabenu Haim Huri” was established in Beersheba, and in his name was also built in the city the synagogue “Torah VeHaim”, by Rabbi Kadir Shlomo Atun and others — the same name that the house of study he founded in Gabès bore. Streets in Ashdod, in Lod, in Ofakim, in Safed and in Netivot are called by his name.

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• Beersheba