Rabbi Sabato was born in Cairo in 1952 to a Sephardic Jewish family. His grandfather had moved to Cairo from Aleppo, Syria, in the early twentieth century, a time when Aleppo's Jewish community was dwindling, due to the lessening of Aleppo's significance in regional trade, as a result of the Suez Canal. Rabbi Sabato's family, and the rest of the Jewish community, were forced to leave Egypt in 1957 by the Egyptian leader, Gamal Abdel Nasser, following the Suez Crisis of 1956. The Sabato family migrated to Israel, but were sent to live in a transit camp near Kiryat Yovel, Jerusalem. Young Haim was educated as a young child in a Talmud Torah in Bayit Vegan, Jerusalem, before studying at the prestigious Netiv Meir yeshiva high school, also in Bayit Vegan. Rabbi Sabato has mentioned Rabbi Aryeh Bina, rosh yeshiva of Netiv Meir, as one of his key influences.

After graduation, he joined the Hesder program at Yeshivat Hakotel, in Jerusalem's Old City, which combines yeshiva study with military service. His experiences during the Yom Kippur War, at the age of 21, eventually led him to write his essential work, Adjusting Sights. It was as a raw soldier, barely out of basic training, and having to contend with the huge Syrian tank offensive in the disastrous first days of the War, that he decided how he would spend his life if he were to survive: he would open a yeshiva of his own.

After surviving the war, both physically and spiritually, Sabato spent the next few years studying at the renowned Yeshivat Mercaz Harav, the spiritual home of religious Zionism. After receiving rabbinical ordination, Rabbi Sabato co-founded the yeshiva in the fledgling town of Ma'ale Adumim, in 1977. Despite having co-founded the yeshiva, both Rabbi Sabato and Rabbi Yaakov Sheilat, his co-founder, refused to assume the title of rosh yeshiva, due to their age. A renowned Talmudic scholar and educator, Rabbi Nachum Rabinowitz, was later appointed as rosh yeshiva.

Sabato's lyrical writing, with sentences studded with phrases drawn from and referring to passages in the Bible and Talmud has won him numerous fans and made him something of a symbol of the "pitfalls" of translating works of literature form one language to another.

Sabato's first book, Emet Mi Eretz Titzmach, (published in English as Aleppo Tales), is a collection of short stories relating to his family's ancestral home and community of Aleppo, northern Syria.

Sabato was awarded the prestigious Sapir Prize for Literature, as well as the Yitzhak Sadeh Prize, for his second work, Tiyum Kavanot (titled Adjusting Sights in the English translation), a moving account of the experiences of a soldier in the Yom Kippur War. The book has also been made into a film.

His third publication, KeAfapey Shachar (published in English as Dawning of the Day: A Jerusalem Tale), a bestseller, tells the story of Ezra Siman Tov, and humble and religious Jerusalemite, coming to terms with a changing world.

Sabato's latest work, Bo'ee HaRuach (to be published in English as From the Four Winds in Spring 2010), was published in 2008, and describes his experiences as an a "oleh chadash", and new immigrant, in the Israeli "ma'abarot" - transit camps - of the 1950s.

Works translated into English

• Adjusting Sights
• Aleppo Tales
• The Dawning of the Day: A Jerusalem Tale
• From the Four Winds