The House Of The Rabbi: Open To All Strangers

My father moved to the Sudan in 1906, he was Moroccan and my mother was also from Morocco. He was born in Morocco but he went as a child to Israel to study to become a Rabbi. When he graduated at the age of twenty he couldn't be a Rabbi unless he got married, so they matched him with my late mother of blessed memory. They matched her, and of course they brought her to Palestine, now it is Israel, and that's how he married her. He was six years older than her; she was just almost fifteen. But that is history, that’s how they did things in those days. He was a gentleman and a scholar. He was a very, very educated man - in those days you know you didn’t go to universities! He was very enlightened from his own intelligence. When he read the Torah on Yom Shabbat, he would also say the Song of Songs, whatever there is in Talmud and etcetera in Arabic. Every Saturday when he spoke, when we read the Torah, he would explain it in Arabic. Everything in Arabic and in Hebrew, and he was also a Mohel.

Rabbi Shlomo Malka

I'll tell you the old joke about how he got his wisdom. They used to say that he has six daughters and so he has to find husbands for them - that’s why he is liberal! It means that whoever came, he would invite them for dinner, so they would meet the daughters. And I think it was true the joke! Because he had daughters. His first six children were Esther, Fortune (Mazal), then one boy called Eliyahu - the Commander in Chief, then Allegra, and then Rachel, and then Serena. So that’s the first six - he had five daughters and one son. Then started the boys: Edmond, Samuel, one girl called Vicky and last, four years later me, the baby. We used to call Vicky the princess because she was one daughter amongst three sons. But the house of the Rabbi was an open house to all strangers. Whoever came to the Sudan had to come to him and my mother, she was ... she used to sing to me. The way they brought her up is to pray. She knew how to take care of the home, she knew how to keep the kosher home, she knew all of it - and she taught her children, her daughters. My father used to tease her, this is one of my memories (laughs). When she served everybody on Erev Shabbat, the evening of Shabbat, she would be serving this one, serving that one. Of course we had servants who helped her, but she insisted on all of the kashrut etcetera etcetera, so she was in the kitchen most of time. But the funny part is that when she helped everybody she would sit down, the last one to start eating and then he used to tease her. He will say, ‘Rubiseh’, which means Rabbanit, ‘Are you still eating???’ and she hasn’t even started! (laughs) She never called him Shlomo near us, she only called him ‘ya chacham’ it means ‘the wise man’.

Growing up there was a room for the girls and a room for the boys. It was the big home of the Rabbi. I played right underneath my mother in the house. As we grew up, in the early morning we said our prayers with the Rabbi, with my father. And we went to the synagogue with my father. Nobody had cars or anything in those days. I grew up, I played with the kids, they broke my arm when I was thirteen when I was playing soccer, koura. These are the memories! But my brother Samuel became a good tennis player so he taught me, he is the only one I could look up to, he was the youngest of the others - the boys - before I was born. He was a mentor so to speak. But in the business world, after the war, my mentor became my oldest brother. He called the shots because my father was getting old and he was the right hand of the father. He said, ‘David you do this, David you do that.’ I took all their instructions and I laughed!

Rabbi Malka at the head of a communal meal