Name Meir Rekhavi | ||
Meir Yosef Rekhavi (born 1962), is a British Karaite Hakham and author.
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Biography
Hakham Meir Yosef Rekhavi was born in Leeds, England, to an Orthodox Jewish family, which migrated to northern England from Tukums in Latvia via Germany in the early 1900s. He is an indirect descendant of Rabbi Shim’on Shelomo (~1750-1822) the son of Rabbi Avraham Ha-rofe of Istanbul. Rabbi Shim’on Shelomo the Maggid of Savran, married a daughter or granddaughter of the Ba’al Shem Tov and became the founder of the Savran-Bendery Hassidic Dynasty, his son Rabbi Moshe Sevi Giterman (1775-1838) was the author of Liqutei Shoshanim. Rekhavi was raised as a Rabbanite Jew, receiving his formative religious education at an Ultra-Orthodox Ḥeder. He studied at various yeshivoth in Jerusalem before embracing Karaite Judaism. In 1981 Rekhavi began to question the authority of the Rabbanite Oral Law. From 1984 Rekhavi was mentored by the Karaite Hakham Mordechai Alfandari in Jerusalem.
Rekhavi is the Chancellor of the Karaite Jewish University in California and a founding member of the University, which was created in November 2005. In July 2007 Rekhavi served on the Beth Din (Jewish religious court) of the Karaite Jews of America that performed the first conversions of Gentiles to Karaite Judaism since 1465. He currently lives in London, England.
Books
Rekhavi is the co-author of As It Is Written: A Brief Case for Karaism (ISBN 0-9762637-1-8). He also produced and self-published a Karaite translation from Biblical Hebrew to English of the scriptural text read at Passover, the Haggadah.