Rabbi Yosef Chaim Sonnenfeld רבי יוסף חיים זוננפלד

Born in 1848 at Verbó in the Austrian Empire. He studied with Rabbi Chaim Tzvi Mannheimer, then with Rabbi Simeon Sofer—son of the Chatam Sofer—and with Rabbi Avrohom Shag at Kobersdorf. It was the last of these he followed to the Land of Israel: in 1873 he settled in Jerusalem.

All the rest of his life was in that city. He was right hand to Rabbi Yehoshua Leib Diskin—helping with the schools and the orphanage Diskin had founded—headed the Hungarian kollel Shomrei ha-Chomot and the burial society. That is, he dealt not in abstractions but in what a community is made of: schools, orphans, burials.

The Old Yishuv he led means the communities that lived in Jerusalem before the Zionist movement, on the diaspora's donations (the chalukah), for the sake of study and prayer by these walls. By the beginning of the twentieth century another yishuv had grown beside them—of settlements, largely secular, with institutions of its own. The question was simple and insoluble: who represents the Jewry of Jerusalem before the authorities.

In 1918, when the general city council came under Zionist influence, Sonnenfeld together with Rabbi Yitzchok Yerucham Diskin founded the Edah HaChareidis—a separate community outside the common institutions. It exists to this day.

With Rav Kook he had both common ground and an irreconcilable difference. In 1913 the two travelled together to more than twenty settlements—a month on winter roads, by stagecoach, train, boat, horse and donkey—to strengthen observance among the settlers. They could work together, and did. But on the main thing they parted: Sonnenfeld held secular Zionism inadmissible in principle and spoke of the Zionists harshly; Rav Kook's book Orot he banned.

He died on 19 Adar I 5692 and is buried on the Mount of Olives beside his teacher, Rabbi Avrohom Shag.