Baba Sali—Rabbi Israel Abuhatzeira בַּאבָּא סָאלִי — רַבִּי יִשְׂרָאֵל אַבּוּחַצִירָא

Born, by the better-attested reckoning, on 26 September 1889—on Rosh Hashanah—at Rissani in the Tafilalt; his father was Rabbi Masʿūd Abuhatzeira, his brother David, his grandfather Rabbi Yaakov Abuhatzeira, the Abir Yaakov. The birth year, however, circulates doubled: both 1889 and 1890 are printed. Since the Hebrew date (Rosh Hashanah 5650) and the civil one (26 September 1889) agree with each other, 1889 is the sounder, but a reference work should give both and explain why.

In 1951 he came to Israel and settled at Lod, declining the town's chief rabbinate. He then moved to Baka in Jerusalem and, after the death of Rabbi Ben-Zion Meir Hai Uziel in 1953, declined a position offered there too. He returned to Morocco, then to Israel again, and in 1964 settled permanently at Netivot. He died on 4 Shevat 5744, 8 January 1984; some hundred thousand people attended the funeral. The hillula of 4 Shevat is one of the most crowded pilgrimages in the country.

There are two corrections here, both about where the record ends and hagiography begins. The first is about dates: "he came to the Land of Israel in 1922 and again in 1950" is not confirmed in the sources that can be checked. The documented sequence is different: 1951 to Lod, then Jerusalem, then back to Morocco, and in 1964 permanently to Netivot. The earlier journeys are asserted in devotional biography without citation, and should not be printed as fact.

The second is about miracles. The maʿaseh nissim literature and the nationwide reputation as a wonder-worker are a phenomenon after 1964 and largely after 1984, grown up around the pilgrimage to Netivot and inside Israeli Mizrahi religious politics; they contain no documentation contemporary with the Moroccan period. This does not make the phenomenon unimportant—the reverse: Yoram Bilu and Issachar Ben-Ami have shown what happened here, and it is one of the largest reconstructions of popular religion in recent Jewish history. But it is that reconstruction that should be described, rather than retrojected into a Moroccan biography.