ABSTRACT
Ezra Attiya was one of the greatest scholars of Sephardic Jewry in the twentieth century. He was born in Syria, which was then under the rule of the Ottoman Empire. At the age of 16 he moved with his parents to Jerusalem. As the family had no money, Ezra studied under very poor conditions. At the outbreak of the First World War, Rabbi Attiya and his wife fled to Egypt, where he founded the yeshiva Ahavah Ve'Achvah. Under his leadership, the yeshiva flourished, and it retained its fame even after his return to Jerusalem after the war. There Rabbi Attiya began teaching at Sephardic Porat Yosef Yeshiva, and in 1925 he was elected the dean of the yeshiva (rosh yeshiva). Over the course of the more than 40 years that he headed the yeshiva, he trained thousands of students who now form, together with their students, the intellectual elite of Sephardic Jewry. His most famous students include Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, Rabbi Mordechai Eliyahu, Rabbi Ben Zion Abba Shaul, Aryeh Deri and Rabbi Yitzhak Kaduri.
