Shalom Cohen (rabbi)

Shalom Cohen was born in Jerusalem to Malka and Rabbi Ephraim Cohen, the head of the Oz VeHadar yeshiva.[1] He was named after the renowned eighteenth-century Kabbalist Rabbi Shalom Sharabi.[1] Sources differ slightly on his year of birth: N12 reported 1930, while The Times of Israel placed it in 1931; neither cited report provided an exact birth date.[2][1]

As a youth, Cohen began studying at the Porat Yosef Yeshiva in Jerusalem. Ynet described Porat Yosef as a leading Sephardi yeshiva that preserved Sephardi tradition and whose graduates belonged to the Haredi-Sephardi Torah elite.[3] Following his marriage, Cohen transitioned from student to faculty, teaching at Porat Yosef and working to establish an additional branch of the institution in the city.[1] Earlier in his life, he also worked as a sofer STaM — a Jewish ritual scribe — and served as head of the kashrut committee of Badatz Neve Zion.[1]

His association with Rabbi Ovadia Yosef stretched back to their youth. At Cohen's funeral, Rabbi Yitzhak Yosef recounted that his father and Cohen had studied together when they were young, decades before the establishment of Shas.[3]

Cohen's career unfolded in two intertwined settings: the yeshiva and the Shas movement. At Porat Yosef, he taught for more than fifty years, eventually rising to become the institution's head.[3] His dedication to teaching persisted almost to the end of his life; when illness made teaching at home difficult, he continued delivering lessons over Zoom.[3] Rabbi Moshe Tzadka, who led the yeshiva alongside him, described Cohen at his funeral as a sun that illuminated the world.[3]

His early involvement with Shas predated the party's national emergence. Ynet identified Cohen as the first rabbi to support the Shas Jerusalem municipal list established by Nissim Ze'ev in 1983.[4] That list won three municipal seats, and the following year Shas entered national politics, winning four seats in the Knesset.[4] N12 similarly reported that Cohen was the first Sephardi rabbi to publicly back Shas's municipal election run and that he later joined its Council of Torah Sages.[1] He served on that council from Shas's establishment onward.[5]

According to an account given by Rabbi Yitzhak Yosef at Cohen's funeral, Cohen played a direct role in persuading Rabbi Ovadia Yosef to create Shas. Yosef recounted that Cohen visited his father at the yeshiva in Katamon, spoke with him at length, and urged him to establish what Yosef called "this holy movement."[3] While this was a retrospective account attributed to Yitzhak Yosef, it illustrates Cohen's place within the movement's founding circle.

For decades, Cohen served on the Council of Torah Sages while heading Porat Yosef and was described as a close associate of Shas chairman Aryeh Deri.[5] Ynet characterized his role within Shas as more rooted in the yeshiva world than in mass public politics, supplying the movement with religious authority and spiritual inspiration while Deri remained central to political decision-making.[4] The same analysis described Cohen's religious orientation as stricter and more yeshiva-centered than that of Rabbi Ovadia Yosef.[4]

Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, Shas's longtime spiritual leader, died in October 2013, leaving the council presidency vacant. Cohen served as acting president of the Council of Torah Sages until his formal appointment as successor.[6] His position had initially not been formalized, partly because of internal political tensions and concern about comparisons with Yosef.[5]

In April 2014, roughly six months after Yosef's death, the Council of Torah Sages formally announced Cohen's appointment as Shas's new spiritual leader and president of the council.[5][6] The announcement was made at a Passover ceremony in Bnei Brak.[5] At the time, Cohen was the most senior religious figure on the council and had served on it since Shas's establishment.[5] Ynet described the Council of Torah Sages as the party's highest religious authority, with significant influence over its education and welfare programs.[5]

From his formal appointment until his death in August 2022, Cohen headed Shas's Council of Torah Sages and provided the movement's religious leadership during the eight years following Yosef's death.[7]

Throughout his tenure as Shas's spiritual leader, Cohen advanced positions reflecting his strict, yeshiva-centered religious outlook and frequently entered public disputes over military service, education, government policy, and religion-and-state reforms.

On Haredi military conscription, Cohen was an outspoken opponent of drafting ultra-Orthodox men into the Israel Defense Forces. At a major anti-conscription gathering in Bnei Brak in 2014, he warned that the proposed draft law could be particularly damaging to Sephardi yeshiva students, arguing that criticism of yeshiva students was "penetrating" the Sephardi community.[8] He said he knew of yeshiva students whose parents wanted them to enlist and stressed that their rabbis were protecting them from doing so.[8] Cohen also rejected merging Shas with the Ashkenazi ultra-Orthodox party United Torah Judaism, opposing a proposed merger in 2019.[2]

In June 2014, shortly after his appointment, Cohen published an open letter opposing academic study by Haredi women, including at Haredi-oriented colleges.[9] He argued that some professors did not uphold the religious worldview in which the women had been raised and that curricula based on scientific research methods contravened Torah principles.[9] He urged women not to pursue academic study in any institutional framework. The ruling drew criticism because it appeared to conflict with the position of Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, who had supported his daughter Adina Bar-Shalom in founding Haredi College Jerusalem.[9]

Following the backlash, Cohen's associates circulated a clarification drawing on a statement Cohen had signed with other rabbis in 2009.[9] That document offered a more qualified position: married women already working in education could complete a first degree, while unmarried women who were not teachers could study only with the approval of a rabbinic exceptions committee and at institutions whose lecturers and curricula met religious conditions.[9]

In June 2021, Cohen instructed Shas lawmakers and movement officials to refuse cooperation with the incoming government led by Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid.[10] Speaking at a meeting with the Shas Knesset faction at his home in Jerusalem's Old City, he denounced the government as "iniquitous" and "wicked," accusing it of seeking to uproot religious faith.[10] He said seeking government assistance would constitute a desecration of God's name and expressed confidence that God would provide for Shas's institutions.[10]

In July 2021, amid government plans to alter state kashrut and conversion arrangements, Cohen wrote to rabbis and religious-court judges — including state employees and members of the Chief Rabbinate — urging them to oppose the proposed changes and refuse cooperation even if legally required to comply.[11] He accused the reforms' proponents of threatening Jewish religious institutions in Israel.[11]

At a Shas event in Netivot in February 2015, Cohen attracted headlines when he referred to Israel's national anthem, "Hatikvah," as "the stupid song."[12] He recounted that as a child he had been puzzled to see Rabbi Ovadia Yosef appearing to sing the anthem at a ceremony and that Yosef later told him he had actually been reciting the prayer "Aleinu Leshabeach."[12] Shas responded that Cohen's Jerusalem upbringing and attachment to the Land of Israel should not be judged by his view that Torah sources were immeasurably superior to a modern national song.[12]

Cohen died at Jerusalem's Hadassah Ein Kerem Hospital during the night before Monday, August 22, 2022, after hospitalization for a leg infection and a deterioration in his condition.[3][13] His family and Shas officials did not formally announce a cause of death.[2] He was survived by five sons and three daughters.[2]

His funeral procession began at the Porat Yosef Yeshiva in Jerusalem's Geula neighborhood and proceeded to the Sanhedria Cemetery in northern Jerusalem.[3] He was buried beside his wife and near the grave of Rabbi Ovadia Yosef.[2] Tens of thousands of mourners joined the procession despite intense summer heat, and the eulogies were shortened because of the weather conditions.[3] Police had prepared for the crowds expected at Porat Yosef.[13]

At the funeral, his son Rabbi Yaakov Cohen said that his father had cared about all Israel throughout his life and that the family had never heard him say the word "I."[3] Rabbi Moshe Tzadka compared Cohen to a sun illuminating the world.[3] Israeli President Isaac Herzog described Cohen as a spiritual leader who guided a large public in Israel and the Jewish world with humility and modesty and recalled his deep love and connection to Jerusalem.[7]

Cohen's career spanned more than half a century of activity in the Sephardi Haredi world, from his studies and decades of teaching at Porat Yosef to his participation in Shas and his final years as the movement's highest religious authority. Rabbi Yitzhak Yosef's account that Cohen persuaded Rabbi Ovadia Yosef to establish Shas places him within the movement's early history.[3] As head of Porat Yosef, Cohen led an institution that Ynet described as a leading Sephardi yeshiva whose graduates belonged to the Haredi-Sephardi Torah elite.[3]

Several of Cohen's public statements generated controversy during his tenure as Shas's spiritual leader. Shortly after his appointment in 2014, he referred to people associated with the Bayit Yehudi and Yesh Atid parties as "ignoramuses," saying, "They are there, we are here. They will pursue their nonsense, we will pursue our holy Torah."[14] He had also described religious Zionists as "Amalek," a deeply charged biblical term; Ynet reported that Rabbi Ovadia Yosef subsequently apologized for that remark.[5]

His 2014 letter opposing academic study for Haredi women was likewise contentious because of its sweeping language and apparent conflict with positions associated with Yosef, who had supported his daughter's founding of a Haredi college.[9] After the initial letter drew criticism, Cohen's associates circulated the more qualified 2009 statement permitting certain women to study under rabbinic supervision and specified religious conditions.[9]