His first foray into the political arena was his creation in the early nineties of a municipal slate affiliated with Shas for the Bnei Brak city council. But he put himself on the national political map by joining the protests against the 2005 expulsion of the Jewish communities of Gush Katif, and even joined in a psak calling for the refusal of military orders to carry out the evacuation.

Although Rav Mazuz had always been a supporter of Shas and the rav of its right-wing faction, in 2015 he became the spiritual leader of Eli Yishai’s breakaway Yachad party, which joined forces with Otzma Yehudit, headed by Itamar Ben-Gvir and Baruch Marzel. While that alliance didn’t cross the electoral threshold, and Otzma Yehudit wouldn’t make it into the Knesset until 2022, Rav Mazuz continued to back the party (while throwing his support behind Shas as well).

Rav Mazuz never cared about being politically correct, never looked for personal benefit, and never zigzagged in his opinions. He was unrelenting in his objection to the parades that have defiled the holy cities of Eretz Yisrael, and more recently, he vehemently called out against the US pressure-driven truckloads of “humanitarian aid” being sent into Gaza.

But for all his strictures, Rav Mazuz was warm and approachable, and even kept a diary of the events spanning the decades of his life from the time he was a young man until his passing. And perhaps the most life-altering of all was the tragic murder of his illustrious father.

As he described in his conversation with Mishpacha, it was a Monday morning in January 1971, and Rav Matzliach Mazuz, who at age 59 was the last of the Tunisian geonim, was walking home from an early Shacharis, accompanied by a young boy from the kehillah. It was only Monday, but for Rav Matzliach, it was never too early to prepare for Shabbos, and so he made his way to the marketplace to buy fish.

Times, though, were turbulent for the dwindling Jewish community, which had plummeted from about 100,000 to 15,000 since the founding of the State of Israel in 1948. And now, four years after the Six Day War, tensions among the local Arab population were running even higher. In fact, Rav Matzliach Mazuz and his three brilliant Torah scholar sons and their families — Rav Meir, Rav Tzemach, and Rav Rachamim — were planning to make the move to Eretz Yisrael for quite some time, and had already begun the daunting project of moving Rav Matzliach’s valuable and extensive library.

But that morning, everything changed. An assassin who was lurking in a nearby alleyway fired off a few shots at close range, and Rav Matzliach fell to the ground — the tefillin that just a short time before crowned his head now soaked in his blood.

“The boy later told us that although my father was shot and barely conscious, he screamed to him to get down and play dead,” Rav Mazuz related. “And so the boy immediately lay down on the ground and closed his eyes, and while the murderer thought he was dead, he saw that Abba was still alive and shot again, shooting him in the head to make sure he killed him. The assassin intended to continue on his murder spree, but then the gun jammed.”

Rav Chaim Charir Matzliach Mazuz was born on the Tunisian island of Djerba in 1912. While still a teenager, he was already writing original commentaries and important responsa on all four sections of the Shulchan Aruch, and at 18, he married and moved to Tunis, where he served for the next 13 years as mashgiach in Yeshivat Chevrat HaTalmud.

Afte the yeshivah closed down, he was appointed to sit on the Tunis beis din until the government disbanded it in 1957, when he was nominated to be a general judge in a Tunisian court. He initially agreed to the position, with the stipulation that he wouldn’t hear any cases relating to Jews, but resigned when he was required to work on Shabbos. He then dabbled in real estate to support his family, but when he saw that he was actually making handsome profits, he didn’t want the yetzer hara to get the better of him, and so he only dedicated a few hours a day to business and returned to the beis medrash for the rest.

In 1960, longtime Tunis shaliach Rav Nissan Pinson arrived in the city, where he established a Chabad yeshivah, and where he remained until his death in 2007.

“After most of the great rabbanim left to Eretz Yisrael or passed away, Rav Pinson came to Tunis and built an empire of Torah and education,” Rav Mazuz related. “You can’t even imagine how many people learn Torah today, learn in yeshivot, or at least are closer to Yahadut, because of him.

“Before he came to Tunis, Rav Pinson went to Djerba and established a yeshivah there. At first, the talmidim were hesitant to attend, concerned because he wanted to teach them French, which was a red flag for us. Eventually he managed to convince them, ‘Don’t worry, our only intention is to strengthen your limud haTorah.’ And that’s really what he did. He established Yeshivat Rabi Shalom on the island of Djerba — actually, it was a large beit knesset where all the rabbanim from around the region would come to learn.

“I remember the first time Rav Pinson came to our house. He brought my father a gift, a small volume of Tanya, a pocket edition — this was the first time anyone in Tunis heard about the Tanya. My father asked him, ‘What is this? Kabbalah?’ But they learned the first perek together. I was 15 years old then. Eventually we came to understand the secret of Chabad.”

Rav Pinson, who was born in Communist Russia and studied in his youth in the underground Lubavitch yeshivah network in Zhitomir and Berditchev before escaping to France, might not have seemed a good fit for North Africa, but that didn’t stop him from changing the Jewish landscape of both Morocco and Tunisia. In fact, the meeting of the representatives of two vastly different cultures — the Russian-born Lubavitcher chassid and the Tunisian Mazuz family who never had encountered the chassidic world before — created a synergy that raised legions of talmidim of Torah and chassidus.

Rav Matzliach Mazuz served as rosh yeshivah of the Chabad yeshivah for three years, until he founded his own yeshivah, Kisei Rachamim. His published writings include Ish Matzliach, responsa on the four parts of Shulchan Aruch; Kuntress HaMaarachot, which discusses the rules of issuing halachic decisions; Matzliach Yeshuah, a collection of original commentaries on the Talmud; and Magen U’Tzinah, answers to questions on the works of the Maharsha. The rest of his writings are still in manuscript form.

Rav Matzliach didn’t merit to live in Eretz Yisrael, but soon after the murder, his family made the move and transplanted his yeshivah to Bnei Brak, where Rav Meir served as rosh yeshivah, Rav Tzemach as mashgiach ruchani — he’s now been appointed rosh yeshivah and head of the mosdos — and Rav Rachamim as posek of the yeshivah and the affiliated kehillah.

For hundreds of years, Jews and Arabs lived in Tunisia in harmony. In Djerba, if someone had to go away for a few days, he had no problem asking an Arab neighbor to watch his property, or even his children. Rav Meir told Mishpacha that when he was a child, government representatives would come to the central synagogue on Shavuos to hear the Aseres Hadibros, translated into Arabic in their honor.

But those tranquil days were not to last.

“After Israel’s stunning victory in the Six Day War, the atmosphere changed,” Rav Mazuz remembered. “The Arab world couldn’t come to terms with the victory. They were furious and their anger needed an outlet. I remember being stoned pretty regularly when we’d walk home from the beit knesset at night.”

The rioting following the war was unbridled — 150 sifrei Torah were burned, and gangs roamed the streets, targeting Jewish businesses.

“But the Tunisian president, Habib Bourguiba, didn’t like what was going on,” Rav Mazuz continued. “He respected the Jews and was frequently blessed by the rabbis of Tunisia. He suffered from a throat disease for 40 years, and whenever he didn’t feel well, before calling the doctor, he would call in Rav Mordechai Amis HaKohein to bless him that the disease shouldn’t do him in. This went on for many years. One time he made an exclusive party for all the senior government officials to celebrate his recovery, and Rav Mordechai was guest of honor, seated to the president’s right. ‘I’m alive today in his merit,’ the president told his guests. In fact, the same day there were riots, Bourguiba appeared on television and said in no uncertain terms that whoever harmed the Jews would be hanged.”

Rav Matzliach Mazuz would have wanted to serve peacefully as the rosh yeshivah of Kisei Rachamim, but the tide of anti-Semitism was rising. It was no secret that by this time, his sons wanted to follow other community members and move to Eretz Yisrael.

“What could we do?” Rav Mazuz told Mishpacha. “I pleaded with Abba to move to Eretz Yisrael but he didn’t see the urgency. There was also a technical issue — he didn’t want to leave his enormous library behind. It contained tens of thousands of seforim, many of them rare and some of them valuable antiques. Abba said that he would first send his seforim and then we would follow. On Asarah B’Tevet, eleven days before the murder, we received a message from Abba’s friend Rav Rafael Kadir Tzaban, the rav of Netivot, that the first shipment arrived safely. It was a complicated operation, because at that time it was illegal to send seforim out of Tunisia. So although we began the process of moving his library, we were too late. Hashem had other plans.”

After Pesach during the year of mourning, following the reinternment of Rav Matzliach in the holy soil of Eretz Yisrael, the Mazuz family packed up and made the move themselves. They started shipping the library out by boat, and over the years, the entire library made its way to Yeshivat Kisei Rachamim in Bnei Brak.

S

oon after the family made aliyah, Rav Meir spent a Shabbos with his father’s friend, Rav Tzaban, in Netivot, where he was first introduced to the Baba Sali. Rav Mazuz remembered how the Baba Sali poured him a cup of wine, but in Tunis, they only drank homemade wine. Rav Tzaban was horrified that Rav Mazuz refused to drink the Baba Sali’s wine (it was Carmel Mizrachi), but the Babi Sali himself saved the situation: He poured them both a glass of Arak, took Rav Mazuz’s hand, sang the piyut Yachid Ram, and blessed him with several esoteric brachos, which Rav Mazuz said helped him stay focused during the hard times, especially when his lost his rebbetzin and life partner Esther, just 56 years old, in 2001, and later, in 2017, when his daughter Geulah — who had been ill for many years following an accident as a child — passed away.

After his wife’s petirah, Rav Mazuz wrote the following entry in his diary: “That night, I could not imagine that morning would come, just as Rabbi Yehuda HaLevi wrote in his poetry: ‘On the night of separation, I did not ask the dawn to rise, but still, it came against our will.’ ”

But in the beis medrash of Kisei Rachamim, where hundreds of bochurim are carrying on the legacy of Rav Meir Mazuz and the great scholars of Tunis and Djerba on whose shoulders he stood, they know that the Olam HaEmes doesn’t really separate after all — the spirit lives on forever.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1058)