Amram Qorah was born in
Sanaa, Yemen, as ʿImrān Qeraḥ, the son of Yihya ben Shalom Qeraḥ. At the age of ten, he was orphaned of his father. As he grew to adulthood, he was active in the study of Jewish ritual and law, which soon qualified him to work as secretary of the rabbinic court under the
Av Beit Din, Rabbi Suleiman Qareh. He was also given charge over the community's treasury known as
heqdesh (monies raised for the poor of Sanaa), and served as the head of the
Al-Kessar Synagogue in Sanaa. In time, after the death of Rabbi
Yihya Yitzhak Halevi (d. 1932), he was appointed by the community to serve, alongside Rabbi Hayyim Mishreqi, as an assistant to Rabbi Yihya al-Abyadh, the Head of the Academy and the king's minter of coins, who had succeeded Rabbi Yihya Yitzhak as Chief Rabbi. When Rabbi Yihya al-Abyadh died in late 1934 and the office of Chief Rabbi of Yemen was left vacant, Amram Qorah assumed the role of Chief Rabbi. However, after one year of serving in this capacity, Rabbi Qorah requested of the king
Imām Yaḥyā Ḥamīd ad-Dīn (1904—1948) that he be absolved of his duties, because of a raging dispute between members of the Jewish community over the acceptance or rejection of the
Zohar, which request was granted him after he had served the community for two years. Still, Qorah agreed to partially act as arbitrator in the resolution of marital matters in his community, as also to continue to serve as one of the city's
ritual slaughterers and one that checks defects in such animals. He also served as the liaison in matters relating to the Jewish community in Yemen and the king, and in 1946 he served as the chief
intermediary between the
Jewish Agency, responsible for Jewish immigration, and the Jewish community of Yemen. This position he held until his immigration to Israel in 1950, when an operation launched by the Jewish Agency known as ''
On Eagle's Wings'' brought the vast majority of Yemen's remaining Jewish community to Israel. Qorah and his family arrived in the
Land of Israel on the eve of
Yom Kippur, where he settled in
Jerusalem. In Jerusalem, he met with ethnographer and historian,
Shelomo Dov Goitein, who interviewed him on several occasions. In 1931, in a
responsum sent to Rabbi
Avraham Al-Naddaf, Qorah thought that the book
Ḥemdat Yamim (not to be confused with a book having the same title and published by
Israel Yaakov Algazi in
İzmir) was composed by a relative of the arch-poet
Shalom Shabazi, rather than by the poet himself. Scholars, today, however, refute this opinion, asserting that the book was, indeed, composed by Shalom Shabazi. In 1934, Rabbi Qorah wrote a letter of recommendation for the book,
Emmunat Hashem, published as a rebuttal to Rabbi
Yihya Qafih's
Milḥamot HaShem (
Wars of the Lord). In Qorah's latter years in Jerusalem, he tried to no avail to enlist the help of the rabbinate in supplying educators that would teach Yemenite school-children the preservation of their own
unique Hebrew pronunciation in Israeli schools. Like many new immigrants in the late 1940s and early 1950s, wooden crates of handwritten manuscripts and
Torah scrolls were sent via ship in the port of
Aden to a warehouse ran by the
Jewish Agency in
Jaffa. Amram Qorah, upon his arrival in the country in 1950, was told that the shipment of books he had sent to the country was burnt in a conflagration. Later, some of these books and religious artifacts were discovered on sale in book shops, and one handwritten manuscript belonging to the family was seen by its owner at the
British Museum in London. One of the grandsons of Rabbi Amram Qorah, Rabbi Shelomo Qorah, served as the Chief Sephardic Rabbi of
Bnei Barak, until his death in 2018. ==Works==