עקיבא ישראל ווערטהיימר

Rav Akiva Yisrael Wertheimer (c. 5538/1778–5595/1835), whose name also appears as Akiba or Ekiva Wertheimer, held the chief rabbinate of Altona together with Schleswig-Holstein, the first to do so. He was born in Wrocław, then in Prussia, to Rav Avigdor Wertheimer, a talmid chacham, and learned in the yeshiva of Rav Akiva Eiger in Mirosławiec. With his parents he moved to Altona — at that time an independent city under Danish rule, today part of Hamburg — where in 1805 he was a melamed.

In 1806 he took the rabbanut of Moisling and Lübeck. The expulsion of the Jews from Lübeck and the poverty of the Moisling kehillah brought him back to Altona in 1816, and there he stayed. In 1819 he set himself against the Reform circles of Hamburg and forbade the use of their German-language siddur. The appointment to the chief rabbinate followed four years later, in 1823. He was niftar in Altona in 1835, and Rav Yaakov Ettlinger took the position after him.