Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, an Iraqi-born sage who turned an Israeli underclass of Sephardic Jews of Middle Eastern heritage into a powerful political force, died on Monday at the age of 93, a hospital spokesman said. Dubbed Israel’s Ayatollah by critics who condemned many of his pronouncements as racist – he likened Palestinians to snakes and…
The seriously ailing Rabbi Ovadia Yosef has broken off ties with his former protege for the second time since the summer, bringing their brief reconciliation to an end as the question of who will replace the 93-year-old Yosef as the Shas party’s spiritual leader remains unanswered. Yosef’s daughter-in-law and the strongwoman of Shas, Yehudit Yosef,…
The race for Sephardic chief rabbi of Israel keeps getting uglier. The lead contender, Safed’s municipal Chief Rabbi Shmuel Eliyahu, is the subject of a legal investigation by state attorney general Yehuda Weinstein. Weinstein’s action comes in response to a formal complaint by Labor Party lawmaker Eitan Cabel over Eliyahu’s 2010 ban on sale or…
The race for chief rabbi of Israel has been getting ugly since the collapse of a proposed deal between Shas and Jewish Home to elect their respective favorites. The deal would have amended the Chief Rabbinate laws to permit a second term for the incumbent Sephardic chief rabbi, a Shas favorite, and eliminated the age…
That fight within the Jewish Home party over nominations for chief rabbi has more to it than meets the eye. True, it opens up a fault line within the religious Zionist movement, between the liberal wing that backs Rabbi David Stav and the more religiously conservative wing that backs Rabbi Yaakov Ariel. But it’s also…
An Israeli rabbi who is the spiritual head of a powerful ultra-Orthodox political party was taken to hospital with a suspected minor stroke on Saturday, 10 days before a general election. Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, who has largely set the terms under which his Shas party has agreed to join a succession of governments, was taken…
The spiritual leader of the Sephardi Orthodox Shas party, Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, called on Jews to pray on Rosh Hashana for the destruction of Iran and Hezbollah. The call on Saturday night came more than a week after Yosef was briefed on the threat from Iran by the head of Israel’s National Security Council, Maj.-Gen….
Two weeks ago the Shmooze was a bit bamboozled by the complete loss of any sense of proportion by Israel’s Sephardi Chief Rabbi. Now, rabbinic melodrama seems to be spreading. Chief Rabbi Shlomo Amar claimed that people should pray against plans to give state salaries to Reform rabbis just like they pray when “rockets are…
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