הרב עובדיה יוסף

Rav Ovadia Yosef (12 Tishrei 5681/1920–3 Cheshvan 5774/2013), known to his community simply as Maran, was Rishon LeTzion — Sephardi Chief Rabbi of Israel — the posek of Sephardi Jewry in our generation, and author of the Yabia Omer. Born in Baghdad to Yaakov and Gorgia, he was four when the family settled in Yerushalayim’s Beit Yisrael neighborhood, where his father kept a grocery and the means were meager. His gifts showed early — at nine he was writing comments in the margins of the Reishit Chochmah — and at twelve he entered Porat Yosef, where the rosh yeshiva, Rav Ezra Attiya, became a father to him in Torah. At eighteen, sent to give the daily halachah shiur at the Ohel Rachel shul, he began to differ openly from rulings of the Ben Ish Chai in favor of the psak of Rav Yosef Karo — drawing rebuke from respected rabbanim and encouragement from Rav Attiya to rule as his own understanding taught; those hasagot appeared decades later as Halichot Olam. At twenty he received semichah for rabbanut and dayanut from Rav Ben-Tzion Meir Chai Uziel.

In 5707/1947 he went at Rav Uziel’s request to Cairo, where he headed the beit din and taught in yeshivat Ahavah VeAchvah, but the weakness of kashrut and observance there set him at odds with the community, and in 5710/1950 he returned to Eretz Yisrael. He sat as dayan in Petach Tikvah and Yerushalayim and rose to the Beit Din HaGadol; the psak he wrote at thirty upholding yibum for Sephardim, against a fresh takanah of the Chief Rabbinate, announced his fearlessness. Chazon Ovadia on hilchot Pesach appeared in 5712 with the haskamot of both chief rabbis, the first two chalakim of Yabia Omer followed in 5714 and 5716, and in 5730/1970 he was awarded the Israel Prize for Torah literature.

Chief rabbi of Tel Aviv from 5729/1968, he was elected Rishon LeTzion in Cheshvan 5733/1972. In the chief rabbinate he permitted marriage with Karaites who learned and accepted the Torah shebaal peh, ruled that the Beta Yisrael of Ethiopia are Jews in every respect — the psak that opened the gates of aliyah to them — and, in a beit din he headed after the Yom Kippur War, released every agunah among the wives of the war’s missing soldiers. His banner was “lehachzir atarah leyoshnah” — to restore the crown of Sephardi psak, the authority of Maran the Beit Yosef, to its former place. In 5744/1984 he founded the Shas movement and stood at the head of its Moetzet Chachmei HaTorah until his last day.

For over fifty years he gave his motzaei Shabbat shiur at the Yazdim shul in Yerushalayim, in later years carried by satellite to some hundred thousand listeners. Beside Yabia Omer stand Yechaveh Da’at, concise teshuvot from his halachah corner on Kol Yisrael radio, and the Chazon Ovadia series on the moadim. He was niftar on 3 Cheshvan 5774/2013; his levayah in Yerushalayim, with hundreds of thousands, was the largest the State of Israel had known, and he rests beside his rebbetzin, Margalit, in the Sanhedria cemetery.