Mordechai Mizrahi
1896 – 1939
On the morning of February 24, 1939, Rabbi Mordechai Mizrahi left his home in Jerusalem’s Shama neighborhood – also known as Shaarei Zion (“Gates of Zion”) – and headed to work, as he did every day. He taught Torah and Hebrew at the Alliance school located nearby on Jaffa Road. Walking beside him was his youngest son, seven-year-old Nissim. In those days, any journey through the streets of Jerusalem – and Mandatory Palestine in general – carried danger. It was the third year of the Arab Revolt, which had already claimed the lives of hundreds of Jews, Arabs, and Britons alike.
Mordechai Mizrahi never made it to work that day.
As soon as he approached the exit of the Shama neighborhood, gunshots rang out. Residents who rushed outside managed to see only the backs of the terrorists fleeing the scene. The traumatized boy stood watching his father bleed to death before his eyes. Mizrahi was rushed to Hadassah Hospital by ambulance, but doctors were unable to save him. He died several hours later. Rabbi Mordechai Mizrahi left behind a wife and three sons. He was only 43 years old.
Mordechai Mizrahi was widely known and deeply respected throughout Jerusalem. He was not only a rabbi and teacher, but also the mukhtar – the headman – of the Shama neighborhood, situated at the foot of Mount Zion, where the Jerusalem Cinematheque stands today. His authority within the local community was unquestioned, and his calmness and resilience helped sustain the neighborhood’s residents during those difficult years. His murder was a devastating loss for Jerusalem’s Jewish community.
Mordechai Mizrahi was born in Jaffa into a prosperous Bukharan Jewish family. By 1890, more than 500 members of this community were living in Eretz Israel. Most of them resided in Jerusalem, in the Rehovot neighborhood – today known as the Bukharan Quarter – established under the leadership of Rabbi Shlomo Moussaieff. At the time, this was a considerable number: there were only around 10,000 Bukharan Jews worldwide. By the beginning of the twentieth century, roughly eight percent of them lived in Eretz Israel.
A turning point in the history of Bukharan Jewish immigration came in 1868, when Central Asia was incorporated into the Russian Empire. From that moment on, reaching the ports of the Black and Mediterranean Seas – from which ships sailed toward Eretz Israel – became significantly easier. And after the completion of the railway connecting Bukhara with central Russia in 1888, the journey to the Promised Land was shortened from several months to just a few weeks.
In addition, the incorporation into the Russian Empire greatly improved the economic situation of Central Asian Jews. New opportunities in trade and business opened before them. The community grew increasingly prosperous, and more families could afford the journey to Eretz Israel. Many also had enough money to secure at least a modest standard of living during their first years in their new homeland.
This was how the Mizrahi family – Rafael and Miriam – arrived in Eretz Israel. But unlike most other immigrants from Bukhara, they did not settle in Jerusalem. Instead, they remained in Jaffa, the city where they had arrived by sea. In 1896, their son Mordechai was born there. When the boy grew older, his parents sent him to study at the Alliance school in the Neve Tzedek neighborhood.
Founded in 1892, the school was intended as an alternative to the traditional cheder. Alongside the TANAKH, students also studied secular subjects. Classes were taught in both Hebrew and French. Senior students who demonstrated outstanding academic achievement took their final examinations at the French consulate in Beirut and received a matriculation certificate recognized in most European countries. This opened the door for them to continue their studies at universities abroad.
But Mordechai, who graduated from the school with honors, had no intention of leaving for Europe. Nevertheless, shortly after completing his studies, he was forced to leave Eretz Israel. On August 1, 1914, the First World War broke out, and on November 2 the Russian Empire declared war on the Ottoman Empire. Most Jews living in Eretz Israel at the time were Russian subjects. Like citizens of other Entente countries, they were ordered either to leave the Ottoman Empire immediately or accept Ottoman citizenship – which, for men, meant conscription into the army.
But the Jews were reluctant to leave Eretz Israel, hoping that the war would end quickly and that some sort of arrangement could be reached with the local authorities. The Ottoman government then decided to demonstrate that its orders were serious. In broad daylight on December 17, 1914, police officers and soldiers began arresting Jewish residents of Jaffa and Tel Aviv. Everyone was detained indiscriminately – men, women, children, and the elderly alike. Parents were separated from their children, husbands from their wives. By evening, 700 detained Jews had been brought to the port of Jaffa and forced aboard the Italian ship Florio, bound for Alexandria.
The Mizrahi family was also forced to leave Eretz Israel and found temporary refuge in Istanbul. Soon after arriving, Mordechai began teaching at a local Jewish school belonging to the Alliance network. At the time, Alliance schools operated in many cities throughout the Ottoman Empire, as well as in Iran, Morocco, and Libya.
Their hopes of returning home soon were not to be fulfilled. The war dragged on for four long years, and even after it ended, conditions in British-occupied Palestine remained difficult. Nevertheless, many of the Jews expelled by the Ottomans in 1914 gradually began returning to Eretz Israel, while thousands of new immigrants from Europe also started arriving in the country. Mordechai, however, by then already married and raising a family, was forced to postpone his return. His wife Fanny, a Turkish Jew, found it difficult to part from her relatives and move to her husband’s homeland.
But in 1926, Mordechai and Fanny finally decided to take that step. By then they already had two sons; their third child would be born five years later in Jerusalem, where the family settled after returning to Eretz Israel. They made their home in the Shama neighborhood. The area was populated primarily by immigrants from Kurdistan. Following the First World War, the Kurdish Jewish community in Jerusalem grew significantly. Between 1920 and 1926, around 2,000 Kurdish Jews immigrated to Eretz Israel. Most of them worked in manual labor. In fact, the majority of Jewish porters in Jerusalem during those years – and for many years afterward – were immigrants from Kurdistan.
Rabbi Mordechai Mizrahi quickly earned great respect within Jerusalem’s Kurdish Jewish community. His deep knowledge of religious law, combined with practical wisdom and compassion, allowed him to build close and trusting relationships with the residents of the Shama neighborhood, who increasingly came to see him as their leader. At the Misgav Ladach synagogue in the Old City, he served as the shaliach tzibur, leading public prayers. Rabbi Mizrahi helped his neighbors in every way he could, reconciled quarreling spouses, and prepared boys for their bar mitzvah free of charge. Both Jews and Arabs referred to him as “Hacham Mizrahi” – “Mizrahi the Wise.” It was no coincidence that the British authorities appointed him mukhtar of the neighborhood.
The anti-Zionist propaganda campaign that spread through Iraq in the 1930s led to another rapid wave of Kurdish Jewish immigration to Eretz Israel. In 1935 alone, some 2,500 Kurdish Jews arrived in the country. Many settled in Jerusalem, particularly in the Shama neighborhood. This brought even more responsibilities upon Mordechai Mizrahi, who took it upon himself to help the new arrivals. Yet he fulfilled all of his duties – as a communal leader, a schoolteacher, and the head of his family – with warmth, dedication, and love.
Life in Eretz Israel during the 1930s was difficult both politically and economically. But after the outbreak of the Arab Revolt in April 1936, the situation became even more dangerous. Arabs in Mandatory Palestine declared a general strike, unrest spread throughout the country, and armed gangs launched a full-scale campaign of terror. Terrorists attacked Jews in the streets of Jerusalem, Jaffa, Safed, and other cities, while also setting fire to Jewish-owned businesses and agricultural lands.
British attempts to restore order produced little result. On July 7, 1937, the commission headed by Lord William Peel published its recommendations for resolving the conflict. According to the proposal, Palestine was to be divided into two independent states – one Arab and one Jewish. Compared to the present-day borders of Israel, the territory allocated to the Jews was extremely limited. The proposed Jewish state was to consist of a narrow strip of coastal plain stretching from Rishon LeZion to Acre, including a small part of the Galilee with the cities of Safed and Tiberias. The rest of Palestine was designated for the Arab state. However, the radical Arab leadership categorically rejected the proposal. Terror directed against Jews, British officials, and Arabs suspected of cooperating with them soon escalated once again.
In Jerusalem, Arab gangs did everything they could to drive Jews out of the neighborhoods bordering the Arab parts of the city. The Shama neighborhood, located directly beside the walls of the Old City, became one of their targets. Already in the first months of the revolt, in June 1936, a grenade thrown by Arab terrorists exploded near the Mizrahi family home. The attackers were deliberately targeting the rabbi, believing that once the community was left without its leader, it would quickly disintegrate and abandon the neighborhood. Fortunately, no one was harmed in that attack.
Over the following years, some residents of the neighborhood moved to safer parts of Jerusalem. But Mordechai Mizrahi firmly rejected all such proposals. He believed it was essential to preserve the Jewish presence in the area that Kurdish Jewish immigrants had already made their home. “We must not weaken a single Jewish neighborhood in a moment of danger,” the rabbi insisted.
Mordechai Mizrahi repeatedly appealed to the leadership of the Revisionist movement in Jerusalem, asking them to organize protection for the Shama neighborhood. He complained that British policemen appeared there only at night, while residents remained defenseless throughout the day. Revisionist leaders promised to help and to send a Betar platoon to guard the neighborhood. But that promise was never fulfilled.
And tragically, Rabbi Mizrahi’s fears proved justified. On February 24, 1939, terrorists ambushed him near the entrance to the neighborhood. The rabbi was critically wounded and later died in the hospital. His young son escaped physically unharmed, but the trauma of those moments remained with him for the rest of his life.
Hundreds of people came to accompany Rabbi Mordechai Mizrahi on his final journey. Among them were his neighbors from the Shama neighborhood and many other residents of Jerusalem who had known and respected him and were grateful for the help he had given them. HaMashkif, the newspaper of the Revisionist movement, described the murdered rabbi as a holy man. Mordechai Mizrahi was buried on the Mount of Olives, close to the neighborhood where he had lived, facing Mount Zion and Jerusalem’s Old City.
Rabbi Mordechai Mizrahi’s name is commemorated on the memorial at Mount Herzl in Jerusalem.
In the immediate aftermath of the murder, British police arrested two suspects. However, the Jerusalem Military Court, which later heard the case, was unable to prove their guilt. Both defendants were acquitted for lack of evidence.
All three sons of Rabbi Mordechai Mizrahi contributed to the struggle for the independence and security of the Jewish state. Rafael became a fighter in the Haganah, while Yosef served in the British Army and fought against Nazi German forces in North Africa. The youngest son, Nissim – who had witnessed his father’s murder with his own eyes – joined the Palmach. During Israel’s War of Independence, he was wounded twice: first near Latrun in battle against the Jordanian Arab Legion, and later on the Southern Front in combat against Egyptian forces.
In later years, Nissim joined Israel’s Security Service, the Shin Bet. He went on to serve as a bodyguard to three Israeli prime ministers – David Ben-Gurion, Moshe Sharett, and Levi Eshkol. Within the family, it is said that Nissim avenged the murder of the father who had been killed before his eyes.
Author: Boris Entin
Translated by Lena Lores
Sources:
• Giora Fuzailov, From Bukhara to Eretz Israel. Jerusalem, 1995.
• Yuval Arnon-Ohana, The Arab Revolt in Eretz Israel, 1936–1939. Jerusalem, 2013.
• Reuven Gafni, “Life on the Battlefield: Jews, Arabs, and Jews Again in Jerusalem’s Shama Neighborhood,” Cathedra, Issue 161, 2016, pp. 85–116.
• Haaretz, February 26, 1939.
• HaMashkif, February 26, 1939.
• HaBoker, February 26, 1939.
• HaTzofe, March 19, 1939.
• Interview conducted by the author as part of research for the “EG” project with Maoz Tzur, great-grandson of Mordechai Mizrahi, May 17, 2026.
