Rabbi Yihya Yitzhak Halevi רבי יחיא יצחק הלוי

For thirty years he stood at the head of the rabbinic court of Sana'a. Early twentieth-century Sana'a argued with itself. Rabbi Yihye Kafah and his Dor Deah—the "generation of knowledge"—held to Maimonides, rejected the later Kabbalah and called for teaching the exact sciences. Against them stood the Iqshim, and at their head Rabbi Yihya Yitzhak Halevi, av beit din of Sana'a.

The dispute was not over trifles: how to pray, what to teach the children, whether to receive the Zohar as ancient. It divided the community in two—down to separate synagogues—and in the end a Muslim judge heard the case and ruled that the established custom be kept.

We do not settle that dispute. Both sides stood for the Torah as they understood it, and both had learned men. Rabbi Yihya Yitzhak himself did not go up to the Land of Israel; his sons did: Shalom became rabbi of the Yemenite community of Tel Aviv, and Chaim came with Operation Magic Carpet and was rabbi of Herzliya.