3 Cheshvan · Yahrzeit
Rabbi Ovadia Yosef - Rishon LeZion
Rabbi Ovadia ben Yaakov Yosef - Maran - Rishon LeZion (September 24, 1920, Baghdad - October 7, 2013, Jerusalem)
Yahrzeit - 3 Cheshvan
Burial place - Sanhedria, Jerusalem
He was born into an Iraqi Jewish family in Baghdad, Ottoman Iraq, on September 24, 1920, to Yaakov Ben Ovadia and his wife Gurjiya.
His Arabic name was Abdullah Yusuf. In 1924, at the age of four, he immigrated with his family to Jerusalem, in Mandatory Palestine. In Palestine the family took the surname "Ovadia." Later, Ovadia Yosef changed his surname to his middle name, "Yosef," to avoid confusion with being called "Ovadia Ovadia."
As a teenager he studied at Yeshivat "Porat Yosef," where he advanced to the most advanced class, taught by the Rosh Yeshiva, Rabbi Ezra Attia.
Witnesses tell how Rabbi Attia played a crucial role in keeping the young Yosef in the world of Torah. At one point, the diligent young scholar suddenly stopped coming to yeshiva for several days. Rabbi Attia visited his home and was shocked by the poverty he found there. Yosef's father explained that he had a small grocery store and needed the boy to help with the work. Rabbi Attia tried unsuccessfully to convince the father of the importance of Torah study. The next morning, when the father came to his store, he found Rabbi Attia standing there in a work apron. The Rosh Yeshiva explained that he had come to the store early that morning, when Yosef was opening up. He told the young man that he had found a replacement worker who would work for free, and sent him back to yeshiva.
"You said you needed someone to help, and that you couldn't afford to pay. I am that someone. Teaching your son is more important than my time!" he said to the father, who eventually relented and allowed his son to continue his studies at the yeshiva.
Yosef received rabbinic ordination at the age of 20. He became friends with several classmates who went on to hold prominent leadership positions in the Sephardic world, such as Rabbi Ben Zion Abba Shaul, Rabbi Baruch Ben Chaim, Rabbi Yehuda Moallem, and Rabbi Tzion Levy.
Rabbi Ovadia was soon invited to serve as rabbi of the Cairo Jewish community. Upon returning to Israel, Rabbi Ovadia became the rabbi of Tel Aviv-Jaffa.
He then became the Chief Sephardic Rabbi of Israel.
Rabbi Ovadia Yosef effectively created the modern Israeli community of Sephardic Jews. Yet he considered the main work of his life to be Torah study and the writing of books that would elucidate it.
Rabbi Ovadia wrote about 50 books. And several hundred more were compiled from recordings and transcriptions of his lessons and talks.
Rabbi Ovadia Yosef left behind thousands of students, and tens of thousands more raised by his students.
14 years ago, when Rabbi Ovadia Yosef suffered a heart attack and was brought to Jerusalem's Hadassah Hospital, doctors determined that the cause of his condition was blocked coronary arteries. An emergency procedure to widen them (a so-called "catheterization") was required.
In extremely critical condition, Rabbi Ovadia told the doctors that... he would not agree to the procedure, because he urgently needed to "go home for 3 hours."
Those accompanying Rabbi Ovadia to the hospital reminded him, astonished, that since his life was in danger, he, like any Jew, was exempt from performing any commandments. Rabbi Ovadia then felt compelled to explain his behavior in detail: "The attack happened," said Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, "while I was writing a response to a woman whose husband had gone missing, and who was asking whether she was permitted to remarry, since she is an 'agunah' (the status of a woman formally still married, whose husband has disappeared and about whose death there is insufficient information)."
"I must finish the letter," Rabbi Ovadia explained, "because a person who goes into the hospital doesn't know whether he will come out again or not. That is why I must go home and finish my response to this unfortunate woman..."
There were many cases in which Rabbi Ovadia Yosef had to make extremely complex halachic rulings, helping people who found themselves in the most difficult situations.
The army, the Mossad, and other intelligence services operating abroad, behind enemy lines, more than once turned to the rabbi when no one else could take responsibility for deciding, for example, whether a woman - usually still very young - who had effectively lost her soldier husband could remarry. As is now known, Rabbi Ovadia Yosef helped roughly a thousand agunot to be "freed," in accordance with Jewish Law, from the status of agunah and to remarry.
The historical and spiritual magnitude of Rabbi Ovadia's personality can already be seen today. Everything becomes clear through comparison.
Ask people on the street about those who, only recently, were ministers and Knesset members, the "arbiters of the nation's fate." Who knows or remembers them? Even David Ben-Gurion is known to many today solely by the name of an airport. No one reads the books he wrote, or the books of his speeches, anymore.
The books written by Rabbi Ovadia, however - and this can already be said with certainty (!) - will still be on the shelves in the homes of religious Jews in 50 and even 100 years. And not merely sitting there, but being seriously studied.
Incidentally, the Sephardic siddur (prayer book), revised by Rabbi Ovadia, is already today the version accepted in practically all Sephardic synagogues.
We - including the authors of this article - due to our lack of knowledge in Torah and Judaism, are, alas, "nobodies" when it comes to giving any adequate assessment of the contribution to Torah study made by the greatest rabbi of our generation, Rabbi Ovadia Yosef.
May the merit of this tzadik protect Am Yisrael!
(evrey.com - Rabbi Eliyahu Essas)
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Grave: Ovadia Yosef