by By Dovid Zaklikowski – Chabad.org
Former Israeli Chief Rabbi Mordechai Eliyahu addresses a 2007 mass Bar and Bat Mitzvah celebration for Israeli orphans sponsored by Colel Chabad.
Rabbi Mordechai Eliyahu, who at the age of 28, became the youngest member ever to serve as a judge in the Israeli rabbinical courts, and later served for a decade as Israel’s Sephardic Chief Rabbi, succumbed Monday afternoon to a prolonged illness. He was 81.
Born in 1929 in Jerusalem’s Old City, Eliyahu was orphaned from his father at the age of 11. He spent his childhood in poverty, and devoted his energies to studying Jewish texts night and day under the tutelage of the city’s leading scholars and Kabbalists. He became proficient in rabbinic law under legal authority and future Israeli Chief Rabbi Yitzchak Nissam.