Bracha Kapach, Israel Prize-winning charity organizer, dies at 90
Kapach immigrated from Yemen in 1941 with her husband, who also won the Israel Prize in 1969 for his rabbinic scholarship
Bracha Kapach, who in 1999 won the Israel Prize for her work helping the needy, passed away Tuesday in Jerusalem at the age of 90.
Rabbanit Kapach, as she was known, ran a private charity for at least 50 years out of her home in Jerusalem’s Nahlaot neighborhood that distributed care packages to the impoverished on holidays and before the Sabbath.
She organized a summer camp for underprivileged youth, and in the early years of the state, founded and ran a textile business which employed dozens of women.
Kapach was born in 1923 in Yemen and married her husband, Rabbi Yosef Kapach, when she was just eleven. The couple and their young children emigrated to then-Palestine in 1941, where Yosef Kapach, who died in 2000, became a leading figure among Yemenite Jews in Israel and an important scholar of Sephardic rabbinical thought.
Yosef Kapach was awarded the Israel Prize in 1969 for his scholarship. When his wife won in 1999, while he was still alive, the two became the only married couple to have both received the award, considered one of Israel’s highest civil honors.