Rav Ben Zion Abba Shaul—Or leTzion רבי בן ציון אבא שאול
head of Porat Yosef, who taught from a wheelchair
He was born in 5684 (1924) in Jerusalem, the eldest son in a family of sixteen children; his father Eliyahu was a shoemaker and a learned man. The closest student of Rav Ezra Attia, he took the head of Porat Yosef in 5743 (1983), after the death of Rav Yehuda Tzadka. That same year, in the middle of a eulogy, he was taken ill, and soon after a stroke took half his body and left his speech slurred. He stayed in a wheelchair—and for fifteen more years he taught and carried the affairs of the community. His Or leTzion—responsa and rules of practice—stands in Sephardi homes beside the books of Rav Ovadia, and where they part, the Sephardi world chooses its teacher.
He founded the school network Ma'ayan ha-Chinuch ha-Torani. About two hundred thousand came to his funeral in 1998.
On the timeline
Places
Related
Sources
Acharonim and later rabbinic literature
- Or leTzion — responsa and rules of Sephardi practice
Scholarship
- The standard rabbinic reference works and encyclopedias — the family, Porat Yosef, the stroke and the fifteen years from the chair
Basis: Talmud and midrash.