Shimon Garidi

Shimon Garidi was born in 1912 in Dhamar

Garidi was born in Dhamar, Yemen, in 1912. His father Yahya was a ritual slaughterer and scribe, and his grandfather was head of the Dhamar rabbinical court. He moved to the Land of Israel with his parents in 1920.

He went to school in Tel Aviv, including the Tachkemoni school. He later earned a master's degree in Islamic and Jewish studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

From 1932 to 1944 he taught Hebrew. He was active in the Yemenite youth group Bnei Shalom in Jerusalem and was secretary of the Yemenite Association from 1940 to 1944. He also edited the newspaper HaMizrah and wrote on Yemenite Jewry for several papers.

In 1951 he led the Yemenite Association list and won its single Knesset seat. The party then joined the General Zionists, but in 1955 he broke away again. The party failed to pass the threshold in the 1955 elections and he lost his seat.

He edited many books on Yemenite Jews over the following decades. In 1987 he was named a Distinguished Citizen of Tel Aviv. He was married to Segula and had 3 children, and he died in 2003.