Peres offers condolences to Ovadia Yosef on son’s passing

President Shimon Peres called Shas spiritual leader Rabbi Ovadia Yosef on Saturday evening to offer his condolences for the passing of the rabbi’s son Yaakov on Friday.

Peres said he shared in the family’s pain at the loss and would visit their home in person on Sunday.

Rabbi Yaakov Yosef was laid to rest Friday afternoon after dying at Hadassah Hospital in Ein Kerem hours earlier.

Tens of thousands of mourners flocked to Jerusalem’s Har Menuhot cemetery on Friday before sundown to pay their final respects at Yosef’s funeral.

Yaakov Yosef, 66, the rabbi of Jerusalem’s Givat Moshe neighborhood and a far more hardline political figure than his father, was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer over a year ago. He suffered a multi-system failure earlier this week and succumbed to to the disease on Friday afternoon.

Deputy Religious Affairs Minister Rabbi Eli Ben Dahan, from the national-religious Jewish Home party, eulogized Yosef as one of the premier religious authorities of the age who would “answer every person individually.”

“I mourn the passing, with great sorrow, of the great learned scholar Rabbi Yaakov Yosef,” he said.

Yosef was one of the founders of the Shas party, and served as an MK in the 11th Knesset and as a Jerusalem city councilman with the ultra-Orthodox party. During his term, he quarreled with the faction and even accused the party of being corrupt. Yosef’s father denied the allegations and called his son’s accusations an “outright lie,” causing a rift between him and his son. The younger Yosef eventually left his father’s party.

Relations between Yosef and his father, who served as Israel’s chief Sephardi rabbi in the 1970s, were strained at times, largely due to ideological differences. Yaakov favored more hardline halachic interpretations than his father, including on matters of land for peace. Ovadia Yosef favored land for peace agreements while his son said such deals were forbidden.

The son also endorsed the ostensible duty of soldiers to refuse orders to evacuate settlements, and backed rulings against renting homes to Arabs.

Father and son were said to have improved relations in recent years.

In 2011, Yosef was called in for questioning by the police for endorsing the book “Torat Hamelech” which promoted the murder of non-Jews under certain circumstances. Yosef refused to respond to the police’s request and was arrested. He was later released and the police closed the case against him without pressing charges.

Israel’s Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi Yona Metzger called his death “a great loss for the Jewish people, the Land of Israel, and the world of Sephardic halakha and jurisprudence.”

Metzger said Yosef’s “love for the Land of Israel was great and he experienced great regret over every foot of the Land of Israel that was returned [to the Palestinians] as if it were a precious diamond that was lost.”