Rav Ovadia Yosef was born in Baghdad on 12 Tishrei 5681 (September 1920), the eldest son of Yaakov and Gorgia. He was named Ovadia after Rabbi Abdallah Somekh and his grandfather, and Yosef after Rabbi Yosef Chaim, the Ben Ish Chai. In 1924, at the age of four, he came with his family to Jerusalem, where they settled in the Beit Yisrael neighbourhood.

In 1933, aged twelve, he entered the Porat Yosef yeshiva in the Old City, whose head, Rabbi Ezra Attiya, became his spiritual father. At eighteen he was already giving a daily halacha class on the Ben Ish Chai. In 1940 he received semicha from Rabbi Ben-Zion Meir Hai Uziel, and in 1944 he married Margalit, daughter of Rabbi Avraham HaLevi Fattal.

In 1947, at Rabbi Uziel's request, he went to Egypt, where he served as deputy to Chief Rabbi Chaim Nahum Effendi and head of the Cairo rabbinical court, returning to Israel in 1950. He then served as a dayan in Petach Tikva and Jerusalem, joined the Supreme Rabbinical Court in 1965 and became Sephardic Chief Rabbi of Tel Aviv in 1968. Awarded the Israel Prize in 1970, he was elected Sephardic Chief Rabbi of Israel (Rishon LeZion), serving from 1973 to 1983, and later presided over the Council of Torah Sages of Shas, whose spiritual leader he was.

Known as “Maran”, he made it his mission “to restore the crown to its former glory”: to strengthen Sephardic religious identity and establish Rabbi Yosef Karo, author of the Shulchan Aruch, as the halachic authority of the Land of Israel. He favoured broad erudition and study aimed at practical halacha.

Works: the responsa Yabia Omer and Yechaveh Daat, the Chazon Ovadia series (the first volume, on the laws of Pesach, appeared in 1952) and Halichot Olam, among others.

He passed away at Hadassah Ein Kerem hospital in Jerusalem on 3 Cheshvan 5774 (7 October 2013). His funeral that evening drew, by various estimates, between 275,000 and 850,000 people, reportedly the largest in the history of the State of Israel. He is buried in the Sanhedria Cemetery in Jerusalem, beside his wife Margalit.