Hundreds visit Yosef mourning tent as Jerusalem recovers from funeral

Jerusalem attempted to return to routine Tuesday morning, hours after the city was almost completely shut down for the largest funeral in the country’s history as some 850,000 people paid their last respects to Rabbi Ovadia Yosef.

Hundreds of people visited an open mourning tent outside the late rabbi’s house on Kablan Street in the capital’s Har Nof neighborhood, where Yosef’s family will sit for the seven-day Jewish mourning period.

Shas political leaders Aryeh Deri, Eli Yishai and Ariel Attias were among the first visitors, along with former Sephardi chief rabbi Shlomo Amar and British ambassador Matthew Gould.

Yosef, the powerful former Sephardi chief rabbi of Israel and spiritual leader of the Shas party, died Monday at the age of 93.

Thousands of people are expected to visit the mourning tent each day and it will be open for general visits from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m., and again from 4 p.m. to 7 p.m., during the traditional bereavement period.

Elsewhere, the Jerusalem municipality undertook a huge clean-up operation in the Geula and Sanhedria neighborhoods in the wake of the massive funeral. In addition to general clean-up, city crews gathered thousands of plastic water bottles for recycling and removed barriers and signs erected for crowd control purposes.

Public transportation in the city, which had been severely disrupted by the funeral, was back to normal by Tuesday morning.