שני אבות בית דין ירושלמים היו בעירנו קהיר: פסיקותיהם של הרב חנניא גבריאל ושל הרב עובדיה יוסף בענייני גיור, בעת כהונתם כאבות בית דין בקהיר

Between the 1850s and the 1950s , Egypt as a whole enjoyed an economic boom,and the Jewish community there became prosperous and culturally diverse, with interesting and surprising combinations of commitment to Jewish tradition with socio-cultural assimilation. During that period, the leaders of the Jewish communities in Egypt employed a sequence of impressive non-Egyptian rabbinical sages as chief rabbis and senior dayanim. One of the most prominent challenges facing these halakhic scholars was the high incidence of intimate relationships between Jews and non-Jews. Their policy was that if the non-Jewish partner in such a relationship wished to convert, they should be allowed and even encouraged to do so. The Jewish partner was thereby no longer subject to the severe prohibition on mixed marriages, and the couples' children could grow up in a family where both parents were Jewish. Whenever a rabbi arrived from abroad to assume a rabbinical position in Egypt, he became acquainted with the conversion policy practiced there,and formulated his own position on this matter.In this article, I discuss the positions of two Sephardic Jerusalemite sages who came to Egypt in the twentieth century to serve as heads of the Beit Din (Rabbinical Court)of the Cairene Jewish community. The first was Rabbi Hananiah Gabriel, who held this position from 1925 to 1929. Although he was a serious scholar and held a series of senior public positions before and after serving in Egypt, his name is little known today and his creativity and writings have not received scholarly attention. The second Jerusalemite sage served as the head of the Cairo Beit Din from 1947 to1950, but later received a vast amount of public and scholarly attention and his name is on everyone's lips: Rabbi Ovadia Yosef. Each of these sages wrote several responsa in which their attitude toward the prevailing Egyptian rabbinic policy of converting the non-Jewish partners in mixed marriages is clearly revealed. In this article, we present and analyze the responsa of both sages, in chronological order. We begin with reading and analyzing the responsa of Rabbi Gabriel, who arrived in Cairo in his prime at the age of 50. Then we present and discuss responsa composed in Cairo by Rabbi Yosef, who arrived there very early on in his career. In the final part of the article, we discuss the differences between the halakhic positions of these two sages, and suggest factors that can help us to understand the roots of these differences.