Leader dubbed Israel’s ayatollah dies at age 93
Print Edition
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 yesterday at the age of 93.
Dubbed Israel’s ayatollah by critics who condemned many of his pronouncements as racist — he likened Palestinians to snakes and said God put gentiles on Earth only to serve Jews — Yosef was revered by many traditional Sephardic Jews as their supreme religious leader.
Through the Shas (Sephardic Torah Guardians) party he founded in the early 1980s, Yosef, regal in his gold embroidered robes and a turban, wielded unique political influence from his modest apartment in Jerusalem.
His Arabic-accented Hebrew may have been difficult to understand, but Shas members followed his political pronouncements and religious rulings as if they were divine commandments.
“I don’t want to describe what could, God forbid, happen (after Yosef’s death),” Shas legislator Arye Deri told Kol Barama, a religious radio station. “How will the world run without the sun? How will the world run without the moon? What will be of us? Who will lead us? Who will take his place?”
Yosef once drew fire from Israelis when he suggested that Jews died in the Nazi Holocaust because they were reincarnated souls of sinners.
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