Rabbi Chaim Chizkiyahu Medini—Sdei Chemed רבי חיים חזקיהו מדיני — שדי חמד

He was born in Jerusalem, studied in Constantinople, and in 1867 took the rabbinate of Karasubazar—a small town of the Krymchaks in the Crimean steppe, with no yeshiva, no library and no one to talk to. He stayed thirty-three years.

There he wrote his chief work. The Sdei Chemed—Field of Delight—is arranged as a lexicon: the rules and concepts of halakhah go in alphabetical order, and under each are gathered the opinions of the authorities of every age, examined and reconciled. The book was written in solitude, with sources copied out from letters to distant communities; it came out in eighteen volumes and became the desk book of anyone deciding a question who wants to see the whole argument at once.

He raised the Krymchaks: opened schools, appointed teachers, set the order of prayer. In 1899 he returned to the Land of Israel and spent his last years as rabbi of Hebron; there he is buried.