An Israeli rabbi: What if he goes? DOLEFUL rabbis keep vigil at the doors of his hospital room, men on buses break into tears over radio bulletins about his respirator, and tens of thousands of black-hatted students pray at the ruins of Jerusalem's Jewish temple for his recovery. Were Ovadiah Yosef to pass on soon, the funeral of the 93-year-old Baghdad-born founder of the Global Sephardic Association of Torah Guardians, better known by its acronym, Shas, could be Israel's biggest ever. His followers are praying not only for him but also for the movement he created. Almost single-handedly he turned the communities that came to Israel from such far-flung places as India, Morocco, Uzbekistan and Yemen into a unified political and religious bloc. These so-called Sephardim had for decades played second fiddle to Israel's ruling Ashkenazi elite, most of whom hailed from Europe. "He created the Sephardi identity," says an admirer. Mr Yosef rejected the authority of the Ashkenazi rabbis who had sought to bring Sephardi ones under their thumb. He fostered his own system of schools, and promoted a 16th-century code of Jewish law, the Shulchan Aruch, penned by a refugee to Palestine fleeing Spain after its expulsion of Jews. In 1984 he founded Shas with the backing of traditional Sephardi rabbis. At its height, it had 17 of Israel's 120 parliamentary seats. Its rabbis were political kingmakers. Mr Yosef, who has run the show for a generation, has been likened to an ayatollah, steeped as he was in the fervid atmosphere of Baghdad and Cairo where he grew up. It is said he once denounced Yitzhak Rabin, an Israeli prime minister, as a non-kosher "rabbit-eater" and called Binyamin Netanyahu, the current one, "a blind she-goat." Palestinians, he has declared, were "evil people who were to perish from the earth." But as he has become increasingly frail, his authority has begun to crumble. At the temple-wall prayers, his sons and disciples have been arguing over the succession. A former chief rabbi, Shlomo Amar, who fancies himself as leader, was pushed to the back of the podium and shunned; rabbis refused to shake his outstretched hand. Shas is itself split. Eli Yishai, a traditionalist, has curried favour with Jewish settlers on the West Bank, whereas the more charismatic Aryeh Deri, who spent two years in prison for embezzlement but now chairs Shas, wants alliances with secular parties of the left who champion social welfare and a proper Palestinian state. Politically the more doveish side is in the ascendant. But without Mr Yosef to knock heads together, the movement may fragment.