Rabbi Mordechai Eliyahu, Israel’s Chief Sephardic Rabbi for a decade and a top spiritual leader of the religious-Zionist public, remains in intensive care, after being operated on last week.
Rabbi Eliyahu, 80, was hospitalized last Monday after losing consciousness for several minutes in his home. He underwent an operation on Wednesday in Shaarei Zedek Medical Center in Jerusalem, after which his son Rabbi Shmuel Eliyahu – the Chief Rabbi of Tzfat (Safed) -- said his father’s life had “once again” been saved.
As of now, the Rabbi remains in the intensive care unit, attached to a respirator. Attempts to remove the respirator have not yet met with success, and he is being kept in a drug-induced coma. Sources close to the family say he is awakened periodically, at which times he remains alert while still attached to the respirator.
Rabbi Eliyahu has been in and out of hospitals since suffering a heart attack in May 2008. The family asks that the public pray for the rabbi’s health: Rav Mordechai Tzemach ben [son of] Mazal Tov.
Rabbi Eliyahu and the late Rabbi Avraham Shapira served as Israel’s Chief Rabbis from 1983-1993.