Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, the spiritual leader of the
ultra-Orthodox Shas party, died on Monday in Jerusalem at the age of 93.
Over the years, Yosef served in wide variety of roles: he
was a kingmaker in Israeli politics, president of the Shas party's Council of
Torah Sages, Israel's former Sephardi chief rabbi, an Israel Prize laureate and
more.
However, among Yosef's titles and accolades, two are
especially important to note: he was one of the foremost interpreters of
religious law in recent generations, his name appearing on several historic
religious rulings, and he was the adored symbol of hundreds of thousands of
Jews of Middle Eastern descent in Israel and around the world. He served as a
symbol for both the emerging class-based political protest, and also for a
Sephardi cultural renaissance focusing on the legacy of Sephardi halakha.
Rabbi Ovadia Yosef was born in Baghdad in 1920 to Yaakov and
Georgia Youssef, and given the name Abdullah. The entire family immigrated to
Palestine when Ovadia was four years old, settling down in Jerusalem.
Even from childhood, though he was required to help support
the family, Ovadia's genius and predisposition for learning Torah were evident.
He wrote his first insights into Jewish law at the age of nine and three years
later began studying at Yeshivat Porat Yosef, under the sponsorship of the rosh
yeshiva (the dean of the institution).
At the age of 17, Ovadia had already become a controversial
figure among the Iraqi Jewish community when he dared to argue during his
lessons with the rulings of the greatest religious judge of the Babylonian
Jewish community the Ben Ish Hai, and advocated the more lenient rulings of
Rabbi Yosef Karo, the author of the Shulchan Aruch. Advocating the rulings of
Rabbi Karo as the supreme religious authority for all Jews of Middle Eastern
origin, thereby blurring the religious differences among Jews originating from
different Muslim countries, became part Rabbi Ovadia’s life project.
Ovadia was ordained as a rabbi by Palestine's then-Sephardi
Chief Rabbi Ben-Zion Meir Hai Uziel in 1940. In 1944 he married his wife,
Margalit Fattal, and was already serving as a rabbinical court judge, or
dayyan, by middle of the decade. In 1947 Ovadia and his young family were sent
to Cairo by Rabbi Uziel to serve as the head of the rabbinical court there, but
his stay was cut short due to his disagreements with the local community.
Ovadia began serving as a dayyan at the Petah Tikva Rabbinical Court in 1950,
but dedicated his energy into writing his halakhic texts, “Hazon Ovadia” and
the “Yabia Omer.”
Though he was just a young rabbi, the Ashkenazi sages of the
generation gave their support to Ovadia, including Rabbi Isaac Herzog, Rabbi
Tzvi Pesach Frank and Rabbi Shlomo Zalman Auerbach. Auerbach even wrote in a
foreword for one of the volumes of “Yabia Omer” that Ovadia was, “one of the
Torah giants that have arisen among the Jewish people in recent generations.”
At age 45, Ovadia had already been appointed to the Jerusalem's Great
Rabbinical Court. Three years later, Ovadia also started serving simultaneously
as Tel Aviv's Sephardi chief rabbi. In 1970, Ovadia became an Israel Prize
laureate in the category of Torah literature for his principal Halakhic
writing, “Yabia Omer,” even though some of its volumes had yet to be published.
Ovadia was elected Israel's Sephardi chief rabbi in 1973
alongside Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi Shlomo Goren (with whom he clashed most of the
time), and his halakhic rulings soon entered history. In one detailed and
well-reasoned ruling, Rabbi Ovadia permitted women whose husbands were missing
in the Yom Kippur War to remarry without needing to seek a divorce; in another
he ruled that Ethiopian group the Beta Israel, also known as the Falash Mura,
were Jewish, thus enabling the African community to immigrate to Israel through
the Law of Return. In 1983, he was forced to resign from the rabbinate due to
the law that limits chief rabbi's terms to 10 years, but continued to serve as
a dayyan for the rabbinical court.
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