Hakham Meir Yosef Rekhavi was born in Leeds, England, to an Orthodox Jewish family, which migrated to northern England from Lithuanian via Germany in the early 1900s. He is a direct patrilineal descendant of Rabbi Shim’on Shelomo (~1750-1822) the son of Rabbi Avraham Ha-rofe of Istanbul.
Rekhavi was raised as a Rabbanite Jew, receiving his formative religious education at an Ultra-Orthodox Ḥeder. In 1981 Rekhavi began to question the authority of the Rabbanite Oral Law. From 1984 Rekhavi was mentored by the Karaite Hakham Mordechai Alfandari in Jerusalem.
He currently lives in London, England.
Rekhavi is the Chancellor of the Karaite Jewish University in California and a founding member of the University, which was created in November 2005.
