In the power struggle between Ovadia Yosef and Shalom Elyshiv, the Sephardi emerged victorious over the Ashkenazi - breaking a long tradition.
By MATTHEW WAGNERRabbi Ovadia Yosef 224.8(photo credit: Ariel Jerozolimski)
Which restaurants and food products are kosher and which are not? Who is allowed to get married and who is not? Who can be a rabbi and who cannot?
Last week, elections took place to choose the state-empowered body - the Chief Rabbinate Council - that is supposed to answer these questions.
The elections were an upset. The non-hassidic, Lithuanian-haredi rabbinic leadership, which gradually has been gaining more power within the Chief Rabbinate, suffered a major setback. Two of its veteran members, Rabbi of Rehovot Simcha Hakohen Kook and chairman of the Neighborhood Rabbis Council Moshe Rauchverger, who is also a neighborhood rabbi in the Haifa area, were voted out of the council.
Rauchverger and Kook, both connected to the Degel Hatorah party and adamantly backed by Rabbi Yosef Shalom Elyashiv, the supreme halachic authority of the haredi Ashkenazi community, were replaced by two rabbis who do not necessarily adhere to his decisions.
One of them, Rabbi Ya'acov Shapira, is a symbol of religious Zionism. He is the son of former Ashkenazi chief rabbi the late Avraham Shapira, considered the most important halachic authority of religious Zionists until his death a year ago. Shapira inherited from his father the position of head of Mercaz Harav Yeshiva, the flagship educational institute for religious-Zionist rabbis.
The other new face is Ya'acov Ruzah, rabbi of the Tel Aviv Burial Society and the L. Greenberg Institute for Forensic Medicine at Abu Kabir. Ruzah's halachic decisions permitting autopsies in cases in which foul play is suspected has raised the rancor of more zealous elements of Orthodoxy, who argue that any mutilation of the body is desecration and blasphemy, since man is created in God's image.
But the major victor in last week's elections was Shas. The Sephardi-haredi party - led by Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, considered the preeminent halachic authority for Sephardi Jewry - managed to get Yosef's son, Avraham, into the Chief Rabbinate Council, despite the opposition of the Lithuanian-haredi rabbinic establishment.
In a battle between two rabbinic titans, Yosef won out over Elyashiv.
SINCE ITS founding in the early 1980s, Shas has been deferential to the Lithuanian rabbinic leadership. The very establishment of the party was orchestrated under the tutelage of Rabbi Elazar Shach, the charismatic, fiery leader of Lithuanian-haredi Jewry before the more low-key nonagenarian Elyashiv.
Perhaps the most dramatic example of Shas's previous deference to Ashkenazi hegemony was a political scheme which later went down in Israeli political annals as the "stinking maneuver."
In 1990, the national unity government headed by Yitzhak Shamir turned down a US request to begin negotiations with the Palestinians over the fate of Judea, Samaria and Gaza. Shimon Peres, who demanded that the government accept the US request, secretly attempted to put together a narrow left-wing coalition to replace the national unity government. However, Peres's political escapade failed after Shas backed out under pressure from Shach.
Shas mentor Yosef could not bear to open up a front against the Lithuanians and against Shach. Yosef, who is a halachic authority in his own right and has revolutionized the field of Halacha, could not single-handedly take on the elite Ashkenazi rabbinic leadership, with its venerable tradition of talmudic erudition and long history of scholarship and educational institutions.
Shach and Elyashiv claim to represent an impeccable, unbroken rabbinic lineage, reaching back hundreds of years, that can boast of dozens of talmudic luminaries, educated in the most important Torah centers of the modern era. Before the Holocaust, Lithuania, Poland, Ukraine and Russia produced the dominant figures of rabbinic authority.
Yosef is aware of the relatively subordinate position held by Sephardi Torah scholarship in the modern era. He is intent on using Shas as a catalyst for boosting the education level. Looking back longingly to the golden era of Sephardi erudition, when men such as Maimonides, Shlomo Aderet and Yosef Karo were the towering halachic authorities of their times, Yosef hoped to "return the crown to its rightful owner" after several hundred years of decline, and rehabilitate Sephardi scholarship. Until that happened, however, Yosef had to cooperate with the Ashkenazi leadership.
Whenever possible, Shas has tried to work with the Lithuanian yeshiva world. For instance, in the vote last year for rabbinical judges, Shas joined forces with Degel Hatorah to control the appointments.
However, in last week's vote, Shas could not back down to Ashkenazi demands. According to sources close to the rabbinate, Yosef is grooming his son, Avraham, rabbi of Ashdod, for the chief Sephardi rabbi slot in four years. Getting him elected to the Chief Rabbinate Council is an important step in that direction.
MEANWHILE, THE Ashkenazi leadership did everything in its power to block Yosef's son from getting elected. Elyashiv is ardently opposed to Avraham Yosef's lenient position on laws governing the shmita year, which rests on his father's rulings.
Yosef has supported the controversial practice known as heter mechira, which involves the temporary sale of agricultural land to gentiles. This "sale" abrogates the special sanctity of the land of Israel in the sabbatical year, and enables Jews to continue to work the land. If not for the sale, the land would have to be allowed to rest.
Ashkenazi haredi rabbis are particularly irked by what they consider Avraham Yosef's irreverent style. He has a regular program on the popular Radio Kol Chai station, during which he delineates his halachic decisions in an authoritative, terse manner. Yosef, who answers questions from listeners, regularly attacks dissenting opinions, without mentioning names, including opinions held by Elyashiv.
Shas sees the Ashkenazi attempt to block Yosef's appointment as a blatantly inappropriate form of intervention. After all, the 10 new appointments to the council are split into two groups - five Ashkenazim and five Sephardim.
The battle between Ovadia Yosef and Elyashiv will probably have little impact on the wider public. With or without Avraham Yosef on the council, heter mechira will continue to be implemented by the Chief Rabbinate. Jewish farmers would lose too much money if it were not. And the Supreme Court has already ruled in favor of these farmers against the previous Chief Rabbinate Council.
Rather, the struggle between Yosef and Elyashiv is for influence and power, and ultimately, for rabbinic hegemony. Yosef, the son of a grocer, wants to "return the crown to its rightful owner."
Slowly but surely, he is succeeding.
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