, Columnist
Remembering Ovadia Yosef, the Israeli Ayatollah
Ovadia Yosef was a mean-spirited fundamentalist who created a corrupt party, held medieval beliefs, and made abominable pronouncements about those of different races, religions and political views
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More than 700,000 people gathered in Jerusalem yesterday to mourn the death of a great sage, Ovadia Yosef, a former chief rabbi of Israel and the supreme guide of the Shas political party.
The country had never before seen a funeral of this size. The mass of mourners was a testament to Yosef's magnetism and scholarship, as well as to the work he did to lift up his community, the once-aggrieved (and still occasionally put-upon) Mizrachim, or Jews from Arab countries. (Yosef was himself born in Baghdad and served as a rabbi in Cairo.)
