Those who read my Friday blog post about the Israel-Diaspora deliberations going on in Jerusalem this week might have noticed that I mentioned a paradox in the way the discussions are going, but I never detailed the substance of the paradox. The sun was setting over the Mediterranean before I had a chance to finish…
Jerusalem is having an unusually mild fall. November began amid sunny skies, temperatures in the high 60s, light breezes and just the slightest hint of feathery drizzle to announce that after a bone-dry October, the rainy season was finally about to return. Diaspora Jews are returning too. No, not the waves of immigration that generations…
Will Shas, Israel’s largest ultra-Orthodox political party, survive the death of Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, the Sephardic religious leader whose towering authority enabled him to found the party and unite its followers behind his will? Some political analysts are casting their glances backward in looking for clues — specifically, to the 1994 death of the Lubavitcher…
More than 800,000 people filled the streets of Jerusalem for the funeral of Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, the Sephardi sage and political leader who died at age 93. Many of Jerusalem’s main streets were closed for Monday’s funeral, which is being called by local media the largest funeral in Israeli’s history. The attendees, equal to about…
Ovadia Yosef, the rabbi responsible for turning religiously observant Sephardic Jews from a marginalized minority into one of Israel’s most politically powerful groups, has died at age 93. Yosef was widely revered as a kind of living saint during his lifetime. He inspired adoring love songs extolling his virtues, and his death is expected to…
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…
With the Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations operating under a tightly sealed cone of silence imposed by Secretary of State John Kerry, Middle East policy junkies have developed an elaborate guessing game that takes the form of a will-he-or-won’t-he dissection of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s intentions. The idea is to examine what’s known about Netanyahu’s past, his…
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,…
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