Yoram Bilu, the Saints' Impresarios: Dreamers, Healers and Holy Men in Israel's Urban Periphery

Abstract

Yoram Bilu, The Saints' Impresarios: Dreamers, Healers and Holy Men in Israel's Urban Periphery (Translated by Haim Watzman). Brighton, MA: Academic Studies Press, 2010: iv, 354. ISBN 978-1934843-71-0. Originally published in Hebrew by Haifa University Press in 2005 under the title Shoshvine ha-kedoshim, the manuscript for this work won the Bahat Prize for the best academic book in Hebrew in 2003. The of the title are in fact a number of Jewish men and women, all of them born in Morocco, who have come to host the spirits of holy men (tsaddiqim) in their homes. All the impresarios had migrated to Israel in the 1950s and 1960s and were housed in outlying settlements, far from Israel's major cities. All had come from a cultural milieu suffused with a reverence for holy men and a tradition among Moroccan Jews and Muslims alike of visiting the graves of such Avraham Ben-Hayyim, living in the Canaan housing estate at the edge of the holy city of Safed, is the first of the impresarios encountered. In 1973, during the Yom Kippur War, he is visited in dreams by Rabbi David U-Moshe, a popular miracle-worker from Morocco. Since the emigration of Jews from Morocco, the Rabbi's grave is seldom visited by his devotees. He has consequently decided to follow them to Israel, and directs Avraham to set aside a room in his family's crowded apartment for the Rabbi. Avraham publicises this and his home becomes a shrine, visited by thousands of people seeking the Rabbi's blessing. We learn that thirty years after Rabbi David U-Moshe's initial appearance, he continues to attract pilgrims from across Israel to the Ben-Hayyim home. Avraham has a photograph of the Rabbi's grave in the room he has allocated to the Rabbi, and--surely a sign of the success of the venture--there is a photograph of the shrine in the Canaan Housing Project at Rabbi David U-Moshe's grave in Morocco. The second impresario is Ya'ish Ohana, who in 1979 announced to the world that Elijah the Prophet revealed to him in dreams that the Gate to Paradise lay in the backyard of his modest home in the town of Beit She'an. There is a Talmudic tradition that links Beit She'an, then renowned for the fertility of its land, with Paradise, and soon many people reported dreams supporting Ya'ish's claims. Ya'ish comes to build a small synagogue and a religious school in his yard, which also becomes a centre of pilgrimage and spiritual healing. This site has not retained its hallowed status as conflict between Ya'ish and other dreamers diminish its popularity over time, and in 1997, the complex was destroyed by fire. However, Rachel Ben-Hamo, a resident of Beit She'an who had been a regular visitor to Ya'ish's Gate of Paradise, assumed the role of a healer, specialising in problems of childlessness, with the assistance of Elijah. In a dream, he intimates to her a rebuke of Ya'ish for not having been careful in ensuring the ritual purity of women who approached the site, by immersing in a mikveh following menstruation. Whereas the two male impresarios provided a place of worship and communion with their respective saints, the female impresarios we meet have operated as healers, thanks to the powers they have received from their saints. Bilu likens Alu Ezra's life story to Cinderella's. Having lived happily in the bosom of her family as a small child, her situation changed dramatically at eight years of age after her mother died. The father left her with relatives, and then placed her in service with a family where she was harshly treated by the mistress. When the family participated in the pilgrimage to the grave of Rabbi Avraham Aouriwar, she was told she could not attend the holy site but must remain in their tent to look after the children. A blind old lady from the next tent offers to care for the children and urges Alu to go to the grave site. There, Alu sees a white dove, apparently a manifestation of the saint, and she is the only person to have seen him. …

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