Yitzhak Nissim

Yitzhak Nissim was born in Baghdad in 1896, the son of a merchant who was also a scholar.[2] Growing up in the Iraqi Jewish community, he developed a reputation as a serious student of halakhah well before holding any rabbinic office, and rabbis and community members consulted him on religious questions even in his early years.[2]

In 1925, Nissim immigrated to Jerusalem, where he attended the lectures of Solomon Eliezer Alfandari and formed a close association with him.[2] His approach to Talmudic study was notably described as resembling that of Lithuanian rabbis — he engaged in halakhic discussions with yeshiva heads and maintained scholarly ties with prominent rabbis in the Land of Israel as well as scholars in Germany and Poland.[2] Alongside his rabbinic studies, he worked as a businessman.[1]

Nissim's early scholarly output reflected both his Iraqi heritage and his broad engagement with the Jewish world. In 1926 he published Tzedakah u-Mishpat, an edition of responsa by the eighteenth-century Baghdad scholar Tzedakah Hozin, accompanied by an introduction and notes drawn from a manuscript in his personal library.[2] He also wrote responsa on varied halakhic subjects, some of which appeared in Yein ha-Tov in 1947.[2]

Nissim was elected Rishon LeZion and Sephardi Chief Rabbi of Israel in 1955; an investiture ceremony was held at Yeshurun Synagogue in Jerusalem.[2][4] A 2012 ynet opinion article reported that a petition to the High Court of Justice argued that he lacked the active rabbinical experience required under the law governing the Chief Rabbinate, and that the Knesset subsequently passed a retroactive law removing that requirement, enabling his tenure to continue.[5]

Nissim sought to bridge communal divides within Israeli society. He pursued understanding and amicable relations among different sectors of the population, visiting left-wing kibbutzim that were predominantly Ashkenazi and secular — communities widely regarded at the time as closed to rabbinical outreach.[2][6] His family's modest Jerusalem home served as the chief rabbi's office during working hours — staffed with secretaries and open to a constant stream of visitors — and reverted to a family residence each evening.[7]

One of the more consequential rulings of his tenure concerned the Bene Israel community of India. Nissim took a strong stand affirming their status under halakhah, maintaining that the Bene Israel were Jewish and that there was no basis for prohibiting marriage between them and other Jews — a position he stated publicly in 1961 at a time when other rabbinical authorities questioned their eligibility.[2][8] The episode remained contested, with some Israeli rabbis continuing to raise objections and subsequent procedural disputes over marriage applications generating further controversy.[8]

In January 1964, Nissim declined to meet Pope Paul VI during the pope's visit to Israel. He explained that he would be willing to visit the pope in Rome only if a chief rabbi received reciprocal treatment there, and objected to the pope's failure to visit the leaders of other religions during his Israel itinerary.[2][6]

Following the Six-Day War in 1967, Nissim moved the supreme rabbinical court (beit din) to a building opposite the southern wall of the Temple Mount, near the site traditionally identified as the Chamber of Hewn Stone — the ancient seat of the Sanhedrin.[2] In 1970, he accompanied Menachem Begin on a visit to Hebron.[9]

Nissim's father was from Iran, and he maintained throughout his tenure a special commitment to the Jewish community there.[10] In 1966 he traveled to Isfahan, Tehran, and Shiraz, meeting senior members of Iranian Jewish communities and addressing a wide range of personal, family, and financial matters through halakhic rulings.[10] The visit was partly prompted by complaints from Iranian Jewish women who reported facing gender-based discrimination — particularly in inheritance, where property passed exclusively to sons while daughters were disregarded — and who sought a religious ruling addressing it.[10]

During the visit, Nissim toured Ettehad School, operated by Alliance–Kol Yisrael Haverim, and encouraged Jews throughout the communities he visited to immigrate to Israel.[10] He also drew on his relationships with senior officials under the Shah to intervene in an individual case: through those channels, a Jewish man's death sentence for a serious economic offense was commuted to life imprisonment.[10]

The diplomatic impact of the visit extended beyond the communities themselves. After Nissim returned to Israel, senior officials of the Shah's government sent letters of thanks to the heads of Israel's Foreign Ministry and the Jewish Agency, writing that the visit had left a deep impression.[10] Rabbi Dr. Yitzhak Ben David, head of the Beit Midrash at Yad Harav Nissim, later described the Iran journey as embodying two recurring themes in Nissim's leadership: sustained engagement with diaspora Jewish communities, and active attention to the halakhic and legal status of women.[10]

The capture of the Temple Mount by Israeli forces in June 1967 confronted the Chief Rabbinate with an immediate and profound religious question. At the Chief Rabbinate Council's first meeting after the capture, held on June 10, 1967, Nissim and Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi Isser Unterman together supported restricting Jewish access to the Mount.[3] Israel Radio broadcast the Chief Rabbinate's warning against entry within hours of the site's capture.[3] The reasoning combined several halakhic considerations: the site's continuing sanctity, the absence of the red heifer required for ritual purification, uncertainty about the precise location of the Temple building, and the danger of inadvertently entering areas whose entry is halakhically forbidden.[3] Religious Affairs Minister Zerah Warhaftig also raised with both rabbis the political dangers of permitting Jewish prayer there.[3]

At that meeting, Nissim gave voice to the moment in terms that balanced historic achievement with religious humility: "We have entered the palace, and even reached the table but we are not yet accepted before Him. We have done all that is in our powers to do. All that is left to be done is in the hands of Heaven."[3] He was described as especially opposed to Jewish access and as favoring the erection of a sign explicitly prohibiting entry.[3]

Nissim's theology on this question placed the rebuilding of the Third Temple in the realm of divine rather than human action — a view he shared with Unterman — holding that the Temple would be built by the Messiah, not through human initiative, and that ritual impurity and uncertainty about the Temple's location supported prohibiting access to the entire Mount.[3]

Nissim and Unterman also disagreed with Rabbi Shlomo Goren, who organized a public prayer on the Temple Mount shortly after its capture; neither chief rabbi viewed those actions favorably.[11] When Warhaftig asked Nissim in 1971 whether Jews could pray on the Temple Mount, he reportedly replied: "since Jews ascend it would not enter my mind to stop them from holding prayers services there" — a response that stood in apparent tension with his strong opposition four years earlier.[3]

Nissim's halakhic view of the Temple Mount's sanctity extended well beyond the Western Wall itself. He held that all four walls of the Temple Mount retained holiness because the Divine Presence had never departed from the site, and that the plaza in front of the Western Wall was equally holy.[3] This placed him at odds with Unterman, who regarded only the Western Wall as intrinsically holy — a view that ultimately prevailed in shaping subsequent policy.[3]

Practical consequences flowed from Nissim's position. He rejected an architectural proposal for a two-level plaza separating worshippers from tourists on the grounds that the entire area was sacred and could not be partitioned for secular use.[3] He also objected to archaeological excavations near the Wall, arguing that they would disrupt ongoing prayer services.[3]

Yitzhak Nissim died in 1981 after serving as Sephardi Chief Rabbi from 1955 to 1972, a tenure of about seventeen years.[1][5] His son Professor Meir Benayahu established Yad HaRav Nissim in his memory — an institution combining an academic publishing house, a research institute, and a beit midrash.[1] A 2022 commemoration marked the forty-first anniversary of his death.[12]

Nissim's career illustrated the breadth of responsibilities that fell to the Sephardi Chief Rabbi in the early decades of the state: adjudicating contested questions of personal status, representing Israeli Jewry in diplomatic settings, maintaining ties with dispersed communities, and navigating the intersection of halakhah and national politics that the Six-Day War brought into sudden focus. His positions on the Bene Israel and the Temple Mount are central to accounts of his tenure.[3][2] His son Moshe Nissim became a prominent figure in Israeli public life.[6][12]

Several aspects of Nissim's record rest on contested or partially corroborated accounts. His position on Jewish access to the Temple Mount shifted visibly between his strong opposition in 1967 and his 1971 statement to Warhaftig; analysts have characterized the contrast as an apparent inconsistency, though the full context of his later remark is not documented in detail.[3]

The Bene Israel episode also remained disputed: while Nissim publicly affirmed their status as Jews eligible to marry other Jews, subsequent procedural directives generated complaints that the ruling was being undermined, and different sources reconstruct the episode differently.[2][8]

The account of the 1955 eligibility petition, the retroactive Knesset law, and the political circumstances of Nissim's eventual departure from office derives from a critically oriented opinion piece and should be understood as one interpretation rather than an uncontested narrative.[5]