Free Republic

PA negotiator slams Shas spiritual leader for "insulting comments" calling Abbas "an evil hater of Israel"; MK Tibi claims Rabbi became a spreader of hate "a long time ago." Palestinian Authority officials claimed on Sunday that Shas spiritual leader Rabbi Ovadia Yosef called for the "genocide of the Palestinian people" when he made comments about Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and the Palestinian people in his weekly sermon. Palestinian Authority Chief Negotiator Saeb Erekat said that Rabbi Ovadia's comments are "an absolute insult to our efforts to progress the peace process." Rabbi Ovadia called Abbas "an evil hater of Israel"...

(IsraelNN.com) Rabbi David Yosef, the son of Shas party spiritual leader Ovadia Yosef, resisted a bribe offered by state's witness Solomon Dwek in the American investigation that resulted in the arrest of 44 people on charges of bribery or money laundering last week, according to a report by News One on Sunday. The report says that Dwek came to the younger Rabbi Yosef and offered to cash a $25,000 for him in exchange for a percentage of the money, claiming he had nothing to eat and that the rabbi was obligated to save him. The rabbi was careful enough to...

Three Israeli Arabs from north Jerusalem, members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), have been arrested for plotting to murder Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, spiritual mentor of the Shas Party and one of the great Torah scholars of this generation. One of the conspirators, Mussa Darwish, 22, a resident of Issawiya, a north Jerusalem neighborhood, became familiar with the location of the rabbi’s home, while working as a delivery boy for a grocery store in the Jewish neighborhood of Givat Shaul. Darwish, who according to security sources, came up with the idea to kill the elderly rabbi,...