Nisan Bak

Nisan Bak (or Nissan Beck; Hebrew: ניסן ב"ק; 1815–1889) was a leader of the Hasidic Jewish community of the Old Yishuv in Ottoman Palestine.

[4] Affected first by the Safed earthquake of 1837 and after seeing his press and farm destroyed during the Druze revolt of 1838, he left the Galilee and relocated to Jerusalem.

[2][3] Nissan helped his father run the printing press,[1] which produced a large number of books, and in 1863 Yisrael Bak also started editing Havatzelet, the second Hebrew newspaper in the country.

[2] After selling it he continued with his work as a leader of the Jewish community in Jerusalem, more specifically of the Hasidic sector, where he also acted as the local head of the Ruzhin-Sadagura dynasty.

[2] Bak, who had good relations with the Ottoman government, managed to soften the decrees targeting the Jewish community and initiated and carried out on its behalf the construction of several housing projects in the city.

[2] As part of their reform attempts, Bak and Frumkin opposed the traditional distribution system of charity funds coming from abroad, the halukkah.

[2] Ezrat Niddaḥim went on to build a small neighbourhood for recently arrived Yemenite Jews[2] in the Arab village of Silwan, next to Jerusalem.

He informed him that Czar Nikolai I intended to buy a plot of land near the Western Wall with the intention of building a church and monastery.

He bought the land from its Arab owners for an exorbitant sum a few days before the Czar ordered the Russian consul in Jerusalem to make the purchase.