הרב עזרא עטיה

Chacham Ezra Attia (Tu BiShvat 5645/1885–19 Iyar 5730/1970) was rosh yeshiva of Porat Yosef in Yerushalayim for forty-five years, and the builder of the Sephardic Torah world of our time. He was born in Aleppo — Aram Tzova — to Rav Yitzchak, a melamed descended from Rav Shem Tov Attia, a talmid of Rav Yosef Karo, and to Leah, who after losing children in infancy davened at the resting place of Ezra HaSofer and vowed that a son would be named Ezra and given wholly to Torah. The family was oleh to the Old City of Yerushalayim when he was sixteen, and his father was niftar soon after; while his mother hired herself out for housework, the young Ezra learned day and night in the beit midrash Shoshanim LeDavid, sustained by dry pita with salt. “But the hunger did not bother me in the least,” he told his talmidim in his old age.

In 5667/1907 he joined Yeshivat Ohel Moed as a maggid shiur, and married Bolissa, daughter of the mekubal Rav Avraham Salem. When the Ottoman conscription of the First World War came, Rav Chaim Shaul Dweck HaKohen and Rav Avraham Ades had him brought to Egypt, where he taught Torah in Cairo — in the yeshivot Keter Torah and Ahavah VeAchvah — and sat as a dayan. He returned to Yerushalayim in 5682/1922; when Porat Yosef opened in 5683/1923 and Ohel Moed merged into it, he served as its mashgiach, and on the passing of Rav Shlomo Laniado in 5685/1925 he was raised to rosh yeshiva.

His labor changed how the Sephardic world saw the yeshiva: where boys had gone out to work after bar mitzvah, he did everything to keep them learning, even offering to cut his own salary to cover a poor boy’s place. When the young Ovadia Yosef was taken from the yeshiva to work in his father’s grocery, Chacham Ezra appeared in the store at dawn wearing a work apron: “You need someone to help and cannot pay — I am that someone. Your son’s learning is more important than my time!” When the Jordanians burned the yeshiva building in the Old City in 5708/1948, thousands of pages of his own chiddushim burned with it; he refused to rewrite them — his talmidim would be his life’s work.

The Chazon Ish said of him that “the rosh yeshiva possesses the power of reasoning like one of the Rishonim,” and Rav Ovadia Yosef testified that his rebbi knew all of Choshen Mishpat by heart. He sat twenty years on the Sephardic beit din of Yerushalayim. From his shiurim came Rav Ovadia Yosef and Rav Mordechai Eliyahu, Rishonim LeTzion; Rav Ben Zion Abba Shaul; the mekubal Rav Yitzchak Kaduri; and Rav Yehuda Tzadka, who succeeded him at Porat Yosef. He was niftar in Yerushalayim on motzaei Lag BaOmer, 19 Iyar 5730/1970, and rests on Har HaMenuchot.