Humble Servant

It was an interesting combination. His tremendous brilliance in Torah notwithstanding, Rav Ovadiah Yosef engaged with people of all kinds. He was the Sephardic chief rabbi of Israel, and before that, the chief rabbi of Tel Aviv, a dayan in the rabbinical courts, and delivered shiurim to working men in the shuls of Jerusalem’s Beis Yisrael and Bucharim neighborhoods. In contrast, while the two roshei yeshivah primarily interacted with bnei Torah, they joined together for the benefit of establishing a political framework that would “restore the crown to its former glory.”

But maybe it wasn’t so surprising after all. If there was anyone who understood what the Sephardim had been through in the decades since the establishment of the state and even before, it was Shimon Baadani.

Rav Baadani, who passed away last week on 18 Teves at age 94, was born in 1928 in Hadera in what then was Mandatory Palestine, an 11th child to Yemenite parents who had arrived in Eretz Yisrael after World War I with just three surviving children out of ten. After religious schooling in Hadera, he attended the Novardok Yeshiva, which had opened a branch in Jerusalem in the 1930s headed by Rav Benzion Bruk, and after several years there, he moved on to Porat Yosef, under the leadership of Rav Ezra Attiyah.

Rav Ovadiah was himself a product of the yeshivah and a leading disciple of Rav Ezra Attiyah. But when Rav Ovadiah returned from his rabbinical post in Egypt and had no way of earning a living in Eretz Yisrael, the hanhalah of Porat Yosef informed him that the yeshivah’s meager budget precluded them from paying him as a maggid shiur.