The Chida Comes Home

It is told that in the late 1950s, Dr. Shlomo Umberto Nachon of Livorno heard that the Italian authorities intended to run a highway across the Jewish cemetery where the Chida lay buried. He alerted Rav Yitzchak Nissim, the Rishon LeTzion, and together they decided that the moment had come to bring the Chida to Eretz Yisroel. Dr. Nachon made the arrangements with the authorities.

In 1960 Rav Nissim asked Rav Mordechai Eliyohu, then thirty-one and known for his deep familiarity with the Chida's writings, to lead a group of Sephardic rabbonim in reburying the Chida's bones in Yerushalayim. The group included the Baba Sali, Rav Yisroel Abuchatzeira, and his brother the Baba Haki, Rav Yitzchok Abuchatzeira, the chief rav of Ramle, who knew the laws of burial well.

At Lod Airport the Chida's bones arrived in a small wooden box, and Rav Eliyohu was horrified. He had a larger coffin brought, asked two drivers to immerse in a mikveh and buy a screwdriver, and cut an opening in the bottom of the new coffin so that nothing would separate the bones from the earth. When the small coffin was opened, he reached in to arrange the bones, but he began to tremble and closed his eyes. In a broken voice he asked the Chida to please do this himself.

Immediately a powerful sound was heard, the coffin shook, and the bones rattled against its walls. The other rabbonim fainted. Rav Eliyohu stayed conscious, and later said that his absorption in the mitzvah kept him standing. The shaking went on until, bone by bone, the entire skeleton lay in order.

Those who tell the story recall Yosef's charge that his bones be brought up out of Egypt (Bereishis 50:25), and Yechezkel's vision of the dry bones that come together and are brought to Eretz Yisroel (Yechezkel 37:3, 7, 12).

Thousands escorted the Chida from Sanhedria to Har HaMenuchos. Rav Eliyohu described what had happened as absolute miracles, and he later announced that anyone who needed a personal salvation should daven at the Chida's kever. Fifty years later Rav Eliyohu himself was buried near the Chida. Many Jews have since made pilgrimages to the kever or left kvittlach there, asking the Chida to plead for them in the Heavenly court.