On the evening of Oct. 7, more than 800,000 people accompanied Rabbi Ovadia Yosef on his final journey. Jerusalem took on the somber hue of black, the color of the suits worn by the ultra-Orthodox Jewish masses who inundated the city and cut it off from the outside world.
A little more than 6 million Jews (out of 8 million residents) live in Israel today. This means that more than a tenth of them were in Jerusalem for the funeral procession. If one translates this into American dimensions, the number is equivalent to 40 million human beings. The television stations broadcast live footage around the clock, from the time of the rabbi’s passing in the afternoon until after midnight, the hour when his body reached its final resting place.