Thousands Celebrate Hilula of the Baba Sali

In a fiery and drunken celebration comparable to Burning Man and a Hassidic farbrengen, an estimated 100,000 pilgrims flocked to Netivot last week to observe the 42nd anniversary of the death of the kabbalist mystic, Rabbi Israel Abuhazeira (1889-1984), affectionately known in Judeo-Arabic as Sidna Baba Sali – Our Master Papa Issy.

This year’s riotous celebration compared to the pre-COVID era, with visitors drinking copious amounts of arak, eating kebabs stuffed into baguettes, consuming cotton candy, buying toys and religious souvenirs from the site’s temporary market, and ritually throwing packages of yahrzeit memorial candles into a bonfire.

The ecstatic pilgrims prayed for an elevation of the Baba Sali’s soul in heaven. Overcome with religious fervor, many clamored to reach his tomb at the center of the elaborate domed mausoleum, beseeching the legendary faith healer and occult master for their recovery from sickness.

“There are all kinds of Jews here – Sephardi and Ashkenazi, secular and religious, Haredi and religious Zionist. And everybody gets along,” said Eliyahu McLean, born in California, who lived in Netivot for five years but now resides in Beit Shemesh. “It’s in the merit of the Baba Sali and all the other great rabbis buried here that we get along so well. The place has a special character. It’s special to experience the splendor of the living Moroccan and Tunisian Jewish heritage. It’s a central aspect of life in Netivot. The Baba Sali is the most famous, but many of the synagogues and communities in Netivot are centered around the religious legacy of the many tzadikim (Jewish saints) who lived in North Africa.”

Scores of apocryphal stories circulate about the Baba Sali’s supernatural powers. By one account, the saintly rabbi placed a drop of water in the mouth of a comatose Jew considered beyond help by his doctors. The man immediately opened his eyes and soon recovered. In another story, the Baba Sali blessed a bottle of arak wrapped in a cloth and then poured drinks all day for the hundreds of visitors without it ever emptying. A third anecdote relates the sage healed an IDF soldier severely wounded in the 1973 Yom Kippur War who was about to have his legs amputated.

The Baba Sali’s revered grandfather, Rabbi Yaakov Abuhazeira (1806–1880), known as the Abir Yaakov, fell ill in Egypt while en route from Morocco to the Holy Land. He instructed that he be buried where he was dying, in the village of Damityo, three kilometers south of the Nile delta city of Damanhur, rather than in the closest Jewish cemetery in Alexandria. Some Sephardi Jews connect Abuhazeira’s merit with the Allies’ victory against Field Marshall Erwin Rommel’s Afrika Korps in 1942 during World War II’s pivotal Battle of El Alamein. That victory stopped the Nazis from reaching Mandate Palestine and implementing the Holocaust there.

While for decades following independence in 1948, Israel was bifurcated along ethnic lines between its Ashkenazi Eastern European founding generation and the 1.5 million Oriental (Middle Eastern) Jewish refugees who flooded the nascent state, the pilgrims to Netivot represent all religious and ethnic streams. Photoshopped posters place Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson (1902-1994), known to many as the Lubavitcher Rebbe, alongside the Baba Sali. Although the two never met in life, they corresponded in Hebrew. Schneerson, born in Ukraine then in the Czarist Empire but who lived for much of his life in Brooklyn, N.Y., is considered one of the most influential Ashkenazi leaders of the 20th century.

Parallel to the celebration in Netivot, a hilula was held in Brooklyn at the Merkaz Sefarad Chabad, under the leadership of Rabbi Eliezer Avtzon. The celebration was sponsored by Rabbi Hirshel and Annette Lipsker, and their children and grandchildren. Annette Lipsker and her sister, Chaya Zaetz, are descendants of the Abir Yaacov, grandfather to the Baba Sali.

The evening featured a live hook-up with Netivot. In both places, traditional Moroccan foods were served, together with live music and singing led by paiytanim (singers of liturgical music).

Apart from Chabad Hassidim, groups of Bratzlaver Hassidim were raucously dancing at the celebration. Also present were Ethiopian Jews, some of whom settled in Netivot following the 1991 Operation Solomon that brought 14,325 Jews from the Horn of Africa in a 36-hour rescue evacuation. Besides Netivot, many were settled in nearby southern cities including Gedera, Kiryat Gat, Yavne, Be’er Sheva, Beit Shemesh, Ashkelon, and Rishon leZion.

Abuhazeira was the scion of a leading rabbinical family in Tafilalt, Morocco – an oasis in the Sahara Desert along the caravan route from the Niger River to Tangiers. He immigrated to Israel in 1959. Like many impoverished Sephardi Jews who arrived in the early years of the Jewish state, he was directed to a remote development town in the Negev Desert.

Abuhazeira settled in Netivot, then a three-year-old ramshackle desert slum 12 kilometers east of the Gaza Strip. There, he secluded himself; his disciples would gather at his home to receive his blessing, especially for healing. Today, Netivot has evolved into a burgeoning city of 52,000 linked by a railroad to Tel Aviv and Be’er Sheva, on the train line joining it with the other former development towns of Ofakim and Sderot.

It’s in the merit of the Baba Sali and all the other great rabbis buried here that we get along so well.

The Baba Sali’s neo-Moorish mausoleum, located in the city’s cemetery adjoining a park and palm forest, developed by the Jewish National Fund, remained a magnet even during the pandemic and following Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre. Before COVID, some 800,000 visitors came annually. Nearby, the tombs of Moroccan sages Rabbi Shalom Ifergan and Rabbi Yoram Michael Abergel are clustered, adding to the luster of the Sephardi shrine.

The Baba Sali’s heir, Baruch Abuhatzeira – also known as the Baba Baruch – was elected deputy mayor of Ashkelon. In 1977, he was arrested on charges of corruption and bribery. But his five-year prison sentence didn’t besmirch his father’s status. Released early, Abuhatzeira – born in Erfoud, Morocco in 1941 – joined the Baba Sali during the last three months of the saint’s life. Today, he and other family members continue the cult.

In Sderot, 11 kilometers north of Netivot, is the North African-style mausoleum of the Baba Yago, Rabbi Yaakov Shitrit (1892-1957), a revered disciple of the Baba Sali whose bones were brought from Casablanca in 1998 with the permission of King Hassan II.

Born in the Tefilalat oasis, he studied at the Abir Yaakov Yeshiva with the Baba Sali, and his brother, the Baba Khaki, Rabbi Yitzhak Abuhazeira, who became the Chief Rabbi of Ramla. Renowned in North Africa as a shochet and mohel (ritual slaughterer and circumcizor), he became the Chief Rabbi of the city Resh in Morocco.

At the end of the 1950s, when the large-scale Aliyah of Moroccan Jews began, the tzaddik’s poor health prevented him from immigrating to Israel. Unable to fulfil his Zionist dream, he died of a broken heart, according to members of his family.

In 1962, his family made Aliyah and settled in Sderot. Over the years, the hilula has become increasingly popular, attracting thousands of participants to the cemetery. Though the sage died on Tishrei 26, the celebration is held a week later on Heshvan 3. (Heshvan is the only month in the Hebrew calendar without a festival.) In recent years, a second hilula has been held in Iyar marking the anniversary of when the Baba Yago›s bones were interred in Sderot.

A decade ago, the Sderot Municipality renamed the street leading to the cemetery and the city’s new northern neighborhoods in memory of the Baba Yago. Together, the Babi Sali and the Baba Yago represent the rich heritage of North African Jews which flourishes in contemporary Israel.

Gil Zohar is a journalist and licensed tour guide based in Jerusalem.