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Elie (Eliyahu) Eliachar Born to a distinguished Jerusalem Sephardic family of rabbis, leaders, and entrepreneurs , Elie Eliachar (1899–1981) had a long career as a Sephardic leader, politician, businessman, and writer. He was a member of the first and second Knesset, initially representing the Sephardim and the Edot Ha-Mizrah Party and later the liberal Tsiyonim Klaliyim Party. With David Sitton (whose work appears below), he was one the founders of the World Sephardic Federation and served as head of the Sephardic community in Jerusalem for many years, before and after the founding of the State of Israel. Eliachar was educated in the Lemel Elementary School in Jerusalem and then in the Alliance School. In 1913 he went to the University of Beirut to study medicine, but he returned to Palestine before completing his studies during World War I. He worked in several hospitals and served as a medical officer in the Ottoman Army. Following the war, Eliachar returned to Beirut, where he studied until 1921. Shortly thereafter he moved to Cairo, where he studied law for a year before returning to Jerusalem in 1922. He completed his legal studies between 1932 and 1935 in Jerusalem. From 1922 to 1935, Eliachar served in the Mandatory government and was the editor of its Commercial Bulletin. He was elected head of the Sephardic community in Jerusalem in 1942, and in the same year he founded its journal, Hed Ha-Mizrah (Eastern echo), which collected a great deal of ethnographic and historical material from Sephardic and Mizrahi sources. He also wrote for Do’ar Hayom, the Palestine Weekly, and other Hebrew newspapers. Eliachar’s extensive papers, containing numerous historical documents on Sephardic and Mizrahi life, are now housed in the Israeli National Library in Jerusalem. In 1967 Eliachar wrote the powerful Hovah ‘alenu Limno‘a Giz‘anut Yehudit Bi-Medinat Ha-Yehudim (We must prevent Jewish racism in the state of the Jews). He is noted especially for two pioneering books: Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs (published first in Hebrew as Living with Palestinians) and Living with Jews (published in Hebrew in 1970). ...

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