Chacham Shalom Cohen led his people with reverence and resolve

Photos: AEGedolim, Mattis Goldberg, Mishpacha archives

Every day, for more than five decades, a bystander in the lower part of Jerusalem’s Old City would have seen the same thing.

Sometime around late morning, a figure in litvish rosh yeshivah garb, whose face spoke of the traditions of the lost world of Baghdad’s Torah centers, walked into the large building at the far left of the Kosel Plaza.

Entering the halls of Yeshivat Porat Yosef — the flagship of the Sephardic Torah world, established at the request of the Ben Ish Chai in the early 1900s — the rav would deliver his daily shiur.

Rain or shine, weekdays, Friday and Shabbos, his mastery of the entire Torah would be laid out for the next generation of bochurim.

Last week, that seemingly timeless journey came to an end. Chacham Shalom Cohen, the preeminent rosh yeshivah of the Sephardi world, was niftar at age 91.

While those bystanders would have known that the Rosh Yeshivah was also the spiritual leader of the Shas party after the passing of Rav Ovadiah Yosef, most would have had no idea of his quiet revolutionary nature.

Because Chacham Shalom Cohen was not just Rav Ovadiah’s heir at the head of the movement to restore Sephardic Jewry’s traditional glory. He was actually the founder, the first mover; yet he’d been content to stay in the background for decades, while Rav Ovadiah was the face of the revolution.

Where Rav Ovadiah Yosef was amami — able to connect to the hundreds of thousands of simple folk — Chacham Shalom was the next stage of the Torah revolution: close to Rav Shach, leader of the Sephardi yeshivah world, he was intent on bringing the exacting standards of Porat Yosef to the generation educated in Shas’s schools and yeshivos.

Very different personalities, the two leaders of the Sephardic renaissance were close. Before the passing of Rav Ovadiah, he asked his family to call Chacham Shalom to the hospital. When the latter entered the room, Rav Ovadiah grabbed his hands and tearfully told him, “I love you. Know that I will never forget what you did for me. Not in this world and not in the world to come.”