Rabbi Israel Moshe Hazan רבי ישראל משה חזן

He was born in Izmir, grew up in Jerusalem with his grandfather, and from his youth travelled as an emissary of the Land of Israel among the communities—that was how the poor of Jerusalem were then supported. Something larger than collection came out of those journeys.

He turned out to be a man who in the nineteenth century had to answer in two languages at once. From the east he was asked about law in the ordinary way; from the west, about what were then called "reforms": the organ in the synagogue, the sermon in the local tongue, the reordering of the community. He served as rabbi in Rome, then on Corfu, then in Alexandria, and answered with examination rather than prohibition: where custom allowed, he said it allowed; where it did not, he explained why not.

His books—Kerinot ha-Bayit, Nave Shalom and his responsa—are read as testimony of that time: in them one sees what the Mediterranean communities argued about when the old order met the new century.