Mourners flood Jerusalem for funeral of Jewish mystical rabbi

Almost a quarter of a million mourners from Israel and around the world have taken part in the funeral in Jerusalem of Kabbalist rabbi Yitzhak Kaduri who died at the age of 106, police said.

The crowd, ferried in by hundreds of buses, gathered near the rabbi’s home in the ultra-Orthodox Bukhara area before being escorted by 1,000 police to his final resting place in the Grand Cemetery at the western entrance to the Holy City.

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President Moshe Katsav, rabbi Ovadia Yossef, the spiritual head of the Sephardic ultra-Orthodox party Shass, and several political figures, mostly from the right, were among those who attended the funeral Sunday.

Friends of the late rabbi, who died on Saturday, said some 86,000 messages of condolences had so far been posted on his website.

Originally from Iraq, Kaduri emigrated to British-mandate Palestine as a child and after studies at various Jewish seminaries, became a Kabbalist spiritual leader without ever publishing his teachings.

A man who exemplified an austere life and worked for years as a bookbinder, the only luxury he allowed himself in his twilight years was foreign cigarettes which he smoked through a cigarette holder, aides said.

Disciples were convinced he was equipped with spiritual powers, notably as a healer, and queued for his blessings or for talismen blessed by him and so apparently fortified with miraculous powers.

Kaduri was admitted to hospital on January 15 with a lung infection and his condition slowly deteriorated, leaving the wizened spiritualist to pass away peacefully in his sleep, a hospital official said.