“If we don’t accept this bochur, he’ll probably go to work and abandon learning. I’m not willing for Am Yisrael to lose such a talmid chacham”

MY family has learned in Porat Yosef for generations. My husband, father, father-in-law, uncles, and cousins all learned in the yeshivah, so my connection to “the mother of Sephardic yeshivahs” is strong.

Porat Yosef’s legendary rosh yeshivah, Maran Hagaon Rav Ezra Attia (1885-1970) looked after every talmid like his own son. “My children have a loving father who takes care of them, but not all the students of the yeshivah have a father. Therefore, I must care for my students even more than for my own children,” he said.

Only the best would do for his talmidim, even in gashmiyus. He himself wouldn’t eat more than half an egg, but he had different standards for his students. “Eat an egg so you can have strength for Torah,” he would order a scrawny student. “And maybe you should smear some butter on your bread, too.”

Occasionally, he’d send his son Rav David to the house of an impoverished oleh who was a talmid chacham and yerei Shamayim, bearing a real treasure: two liras.

“Tell him to buy cream and butter so he can gain strength, but give him the money in secret, so people won’t see that I’m supporting him and stop helping him,” Rav Ezra told his son. “He’s an impoverished talmid chacham and it’s a mitzvah to look after him.”

Decades ago, there was a young bochur who had just made aliyah from Iraq who approached Rav Ezra, expressing his desire to learn in the yeshivah. The Rosh Yeshivah tested him and saw he could have a great future in Torah. But the administration refused to accept him, protesting that they could barely feed all the current students.

The Rosh Yeshivah wouldn’t back down. He told the administrators, “If we don’t accept this bochur, he’ll probably go to work and abandon learning. I’m not willing for Am Yisrael to lose such a talmid chacham.”