The storm over memorial events for Rav Ovadia Yosef reached Israel's High Court of Justice on Wednesday, with emotions running high after the justices rejected Shas's petition. The party had challenged the Attorney General's decision to cancel major study days in his memory at Binyanei Ha'uma ahead of the elections.
The court dismissed the petition after the director-general of the Ministry of Religious Services announced that due to tight scheduling constraints, the ministry would be unable to hold the event on a technical level in any case, rendering the legal discussion moot.
Following the hearing, Rav Ovadia's grandson, Rabbi Yaakov Sini, spoke with Kikar Hashabbat and expressed his deep pain over the hearing and the attempt to frame his grandfather's legacy as a political event.
"Several family members gathered here to express the cry that bursts from our hearts and from the heart of all of Israel," Rabbi Sini said, clarifying that this was the first time in his life he had set foot in the Supreme Court building. "For hundreds of years, the Jewish people have not had a figure like Maran. There is no person who was not influenced by his leadership, by his halachic rulings, from the agunot of the Yom Kippur War to Ethiopian immigrants. All of them were saved from lives of suffering thanks to his path. To turn Maran into a political figure and reduce him to some political box, this is horrifying and constitutes a disgrace to Maran."
Responding to the claim that Rav Ovadia himself founded the Shas movement and therefore an inseparable political dimension exists, Rabbi Sini replied firmly: "How many people who do not identify politically are nonetheless deeply connected in their souls to Maran, to his Torah and to his rulings? There is no connection between these things! That is exactly what we have come to cry about, this automatic connection."
Rabbi Sini emphasized the family's view of the posek hador's work: "Maran's political enterprise, in our eyes, is not a political enterprise --- it is an enterprise that is entirely Torah. Maran never closed the book for positions, honors, or budgets. His entire purpose was only Torah. We also expect the authorities to recognize the figure of this giant of a man, and not reduce him to a political box."
