Half a century later, Rav Ovadiah Yosef’s son Rav Yitzchak Yosef navigates the same painful nexus of military and halachic loss

Photos: Flash90

Rav Yitzchak Yosef, who is also the nasi of the Beis Din Hagadol, issued the psak after deliberations with senior IDF and security officials, forensic and health officials, and a team of IDF rabbis. The data included, together with intelligence information and other sources, testimony from released hostages and detailed analysis of footage from surveillance cameras of the October 7th massacre, where experts were able to determine the severity of injury to those being dragged off to Gaza and whether those injuries were survivable.

The psak — given for a few specific cases where irrefutable information was available (including that of Colonel Asaf Hamami Hy”d, commander of the Gaza Division’s Southern Brigade) — allows the families to sit shivah even without a body, as the bodies that have been identified are being held by Hamas in Gaza. But more important, it means granting the status of widowhood to the spouses of the deceased, freeing them from the status of agunah and allowing them to remarry.

For Rav Yitzchak Yosef, it was coming full circle. A generation before, in the fall of 1973, Rav Ovadiah Yosef, longtime av beis din and chief rabbi of Tel Aviv, had just been installed as the Rishon L’Tzion when the Yom Kippur War broke out, leaving 2,600 dead soldiers in its wake. Many were missing, and many others were unidentifiable — and Rav Ovadiah soon realized he was facing close to a thousand potential agunos — women who could not remarry as long as their husbands were not confirmed dead by all accounts.

T

he noise inside the IDF transport plane was deafening, the soldiers mercilessly shaken back and forth in their “seats” — actually, a netting of ropes attached to the interior walls of the aircraft. One of the passengers stood out from the olive-green crowd, and it was not just because of his clothes. Subjected to the same travel conditions as the soldiers, this middle-aged man with a black and gray beard was Rav Ovadiah Yosef, famed for his tremendous hasmadah and outstanding bekiyus, and the newly appointed Sephardic chief rabbi of Israel. He was busy encouraging the soldiers as he handed them each a small Tehillim inscribed with a personal dedication. Later, he would have to deal intensively with the tragic stories of many of these soldiers.

The Yom Kippur War broke out on October 6th, 1973, with the simultaneous invasions of Israel by Egypt in the south and Syria in the north. Israel had to fight on two fronts at the same time, in both the Golan Heights and Sinai.

In an eerie comparison, exactly 50 years before the beginning of the current war, numerous signs of an imminent attack were ignored by Israeli intelligence, and Israeli forces were almost completely unprepared and suffered heavy casualties, especially in the early days of the war. Many soldiers had been released for Yom Kippur and only a small unit remained in the south to guard the Egyptian border. The soldiers didn’t stand a chance and were overrun.

Who would have imagined that exactly 50 years later, with all the advanced technology and cutting-edge surveillance equipment of the IDF, such a scenario would play out again?