Yosef Chaim Sonnenfeld

Who was Yosef Chaim Sonnenfeld?

Yosef Chaim Sonnenfeld, also spelled Zonnenfeld, was the Chief Rabbi and co-founder of the Edah HaChareidis, Haredi Jewish community in Jerusalem, during the years of the British Mandate of Palestine. He was originally given the name "Chaim", however, the name "Yosef" was added to him while he experienced an illness. Sonnenfeld was born in Verbó, Hungary. His father, Rabbi Avraham Shlomo Zonnenfeld, died when Chaim was five years old.

He was a student of Rabbi Samuel Benjamin Sofer, the son of Rabbi Moses Sofer. He was also a student of Rabbi Avraham Schag in Kobersdorf; Sonnenfeld moved from the latter city to Jerusalem in 1873.

He became an important figure in Jerusalem's Old City, serving as the right-hand man of Rabbi Yehoshua Leib Diskin and assisting the latter in communal activities, such as the founding of schools and the Diskin Orphanage, and the fight against secularism. He refused to meet with Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany who visited the Old City because he believed that the Emperor was a descendant of the nation of Amalek. Sonnenfeld sent a delegate, a former Dutch diplomat and writer who had become a baal teshuva, Dr. Jacob Israël de Haan, to Jordan with a peace proposal for King Abdullah.