Shmuel Eliyahu

Shmuel Eliyahu is the second son of Mordechai Eliyahu, who served as Israel’s Sephardi chief rabbi from 1983 to 1993.[5] He studied at Yeshivat Yerushalayim Letze’irim and subsequently at Yeshivat Merkaz HaRav, where his teachers included Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook.[6]

Eliyahu served in a combat unit of the Israel Defense Forces and as a reserve officer.[6] He received rabbinical ordination at the age of 23 and later studied municipal rabbinate and rabbinical adjudication at the Ariel Institute in Jerusalem.[6] After his studies and military service, he was appointed rabbi of Shlomi before taking up the Safed rabbinate.[9]

A 2013 profile described Eliyahu as having served as Safed’s rabbi for 23 years and identified him as a member of the Chief Rabbinate Council and its national kashrut and mikveh committees.[9] He was also identified as a council member in a 2020 interview.[10] His public religious work has included lessons around Israel, regular radio programs answering listeners’ questions, and discussion of political and state-related issues.[6]

By 2014, Eliyahu was answering hundreds of questions daily through text messages, email, telephone calls, and face-to-face conversations.[6] His religious guidance was particularly strict on questions of modesty.[6] In a 2020 interview concerning women’s access to rabbinic ordination examinations, he distinguished women’s Torah study from training women to serve as rabbis.[10] He called women’s Torah learning “wonderful and blessed,” cited his mother, wife, and daughters as women who taught or studied Torah, and opposed training women for the rabbinate.[10] At the time, the Chief Rabbinate opposed allowing women to sit for the examinations.[10]

Eliyahu stood for election as Israel’s Sephardi chief rabbi in July 2013, supported by the Religious Zionist Jewish Home party led by Naftali Bennett.[3] He received 49 votes and finished behind Yitzhak Yosef; David Stav, whom Jewish Home supported in the parallel Ashkenazi contest, also finished second.[3] In an analysis of the elections, Yehudah Mirsky argued that competing Religious Zionist candidacies—including those of Eliyahu, Stav, and Yaakov Shapira—split that constituency’s vote and contributed to their defeat by haredi rivals.[11]

In September 2024, Eliyahu again ran for Sephardi chief rabbi and finished second to David Yosef, who received 72 votes.[4] In February 2025, he was elected to the Chief Rabbinate Council as one of five Sephardi rabbis chosen alongside five Ashkenazi rabbis.[2] The election involved an electorate of 150 rabbinic and civic leaders, of whom 138 participated.[2] The Chief Rabbinate is described as Israel’s supreme authority on halakhah and personal-status issues.[12]

Eliyahu has also intervened in cases involving allegations of sexual misconduct within the religious community.[13] In 2019, he publicly identified Rabbi Shmuel Tal in an open letter, advised people not to seek religious guidance from him or study at his institutions, and announced that a special rabbinic court would consider allegations against him.[13] He had previously helped address allegations against Rabbi Mordechai Elon and led rabbis investigating allegations made by women against Ezra Sheinberg, who was convicted and sentenced to seven and a half years in prison.[13]

In a discussion of the Chaim Walder allegations, Yitzchak Blau wrote that Eliyahu met Rabbi Tzvi Tau to explain the case, but that Tau did not retract his position that the allegations were false.[14] Blau’s description concerned a disagreement over the allegations rather than a court verdict.[14]

Eliyahu has worked to develop ties with American Jews, while also publicly criticizing the Reform movement, LGBT people, and women serving in IDF combat units.[15] In 2022, the US embassy informed him that his visa had been revoked before its expiration; the embassy did not publicly explain the decision, and a statement on his behalf said that he had received no reason.[15] In July 2024, he signed a letter opposing a hostage agreement with Hamas, arguing that paying too high a price to recover the captives would endanger all Israelis.[16]

Eliyahu has edited many of his father’s books and collected accounts of his life and religious leadership.[9][6] His five-volume work, Aviham shel Yisrael (“The Father of Israel”), presents stories about Mordechai Eliyahu arranged according to the chapters of Mesillat Yesharim.[6] The collection drew on accounts he heard during the year after his father’s death.[6]

His religious activity combines the preservation of his father’s teachings with extensive direct contact with people seeking halakhic guidance, including through text-message responses and radio broadcasts.[6][9] He has also become a prominent figure in Israel’s religious nationalist movement.[17]

Eliyahu’s statements about Arabs have led to several separate legal proceedings.[7][18] In 2006, prosecutors canceled an indictment concerning remarks following the 2002 Meron bombing, including calls to remove Arab students from Safed’s college and not rent them apartments.[18] Under the agreement, he was to clarify that he meant supporters of terrorism rather than the Arab public generally and apologize to those offended; the case did not result in a conviction.[7][18] In 2007, he publicly called for the expulsion of Israeli Arabs from Safed and other Israeli communities.[19]

On December 7, 2010, Eliyahu and 49 other municipal rabbis issued a letter ruling that Jewish law prohibited selling or renting property in Israel to non-Jews.[20] It also called for Jews who violated the ruling to be excluded from religious gatherings, and prompted condemnation from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Jewish organizations, and other rabbis.[20][12] In 2011, the attorney general authorized an investigation into other statements attributed to Eliyahu but announced that the letter itself would not be criminally investigated.[21] A separate investigation into reported statements from July 2012 was later closed.[22]

After that investigation closed, the attorney general described Eliyahu’s 2013 candidacy as “improper” because of what the report characterized as racial incitement against Arabs.[22] This did not prevent Eliyahu from contesting the election.[3] Following a petition filed in 2016 by the Israel Religious Action Center, Tag Meir, and other organizations, the Supreme Court ordered disciplinary proceedings in September 2020.[8][23] The court distinguished statements that exceeded the boundaries appropriate to a public servant from religious speech protected by a city rabbi’s freedom of expression; it did not treat offensiveness alone as sufficient grounds for discipline.[23]

Eliyahu’s responses to violence and disasters have also drawn criticism.[1][24] After a Palestinian gunman killed eight students at Jerusalem’s Mercaz Harav seminary on March 6, 2008, he invoked the Book of Esther in a synagogue newsletter calling for hanging the terrorist’s ten sons.[1] He subsequently described the reference as metaphorical, affirmed support for revenge against those attacking Jews, and said, “I don't apologize for anything and stand behind everything I wrote.”[1] He also advocated responses to Gaza rocket fire involving progressively larger numbers of Palestinian deaths, saying, “Whatever it takes to make them stop.”[25]

In a February 10, 2023 newsletter, Eliyahu called the earthquake in Türkiye and Syria “divine justice” and compared it to the drowning of Egyptian forces in the Exodus story.[17] World Jewish Congress President Ronald S. Lauder condemned the remarks.[24] In November 2023, following comments by his son, Heritage Minister Amichai Eliyahu, he appeared to endorse an atomic attack on Gaza during a Torah lecture, saying, “Drop an atom [bomb] on them? It’s an option,” and joking that he would not be fired.[26]