[3] The Saba Kadisha decided to leave Constantinople to accept the position of Chief Rabbi of Damascus, which he was appointed to by imperial decree in 1888.

[2] Following his appointment (succeeding Isaac ben Moses Abulafia), Alfandari ran into troubles with the community for his lack of ability to negotiate with local authorities, worsened by the fact that he did not know Arabic or Ottoman Turkish.

[5] After the Young Turk Revolution of 1908, the Jews of Damascus demanded that Alfandari be removed from his post, and he was subsequently dismissed by the Minister of Justice, the authority responsible for non-Muslim religious affairs.

At first he lived for several years in the city of Haifa, but then accepted the invitation of the Torah leaders of Safed, in the Beirut Vilayet, to serve as their Chief Rabbi, a position he held until 1918.

[2] Shortly before the Saba Kadisha's death, the Munkatcher Rebbe, Rabbi Chaim Elazar Spira, of Hungary made a special trip to meet him.

Theirs was considered an historic meeting between two worlds, the Sephardi genius of the Middle East and the Hasidic tradition of Eastern Europe.

During his move from Syria to Palestine, the Saba Kadisha stopped off in Beirut, where many questions were addressed to him regarding shmita (the laws of the Sabbatical year).

His responses indicate that he strongly opposed the heter mechira which Israel's Chief Rabbinate had adopted to spare its farmers from loss.

[2] Rabbi Solomon Eliezer was a strong opponent of the Zionist National Council (Vaad Haleumi), which, in British Mandate Palestine, automatically enlisted all Jews, unless they opted out.