Rafael Moshe Kamhi

Rafael Moshe Kamhi was born in 1870 in Bitola

Kamhi was born on 15 December 1870 in Bitola, then in the Ottoman Empire, to a Sephardic Jewish family. His father was Moshe Solomon Kamhi. He studied at a Jewish school and spoke Ladino, Turkish, Greek, French and Bulgarian.

Through Dame Gruev he joined the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization in 1894, and his house became a hiding place for its members and archive. In 1896 he was a Bitola delegate to the organization's Thessaloniki Congress. He served as liaison between the organization and the Bulgarian authorities and met Ferdinand I.

He took part in the kidnapping known as the Miss Stone Affair in 1901 and 1902, which was done for ransom. In 1903 he fought in the Ilinden Uprising under the name Skanderbeg, while his brother Menteš smuggled arms to the rebels. After the Balkan Wars he moved to Xanthi, and after 1919 he settled in Thessaloniki.

After the German occupation of Greece he was arrested with the Jews of Thessaloniki, but Bulgarian intervention got him out to Bulgaria. His brother Menteš was deported to Treblinka. Greece later tried him in absentia, sentenced him to death and seized his property.

In 1949 he immigrated to Israel and lived with his nephew's family in Tel Aviv. He died on 8 July 1970.