Gershon Edelstein, rabbi and important religious leader of the ultra-Orthodox Jewish community in Israel, has died this Tuesday at the age of one hundred.
Hundreds of thousands of religious have attended his funeral in his honor, in the Israeli town of Bnei Brak, to say their last goodbye, where streets and highways were closed to traffic.
Police have deployed some 2,000 officers to monitor security during the massive funeral procession.
Edelstein had been hospitalized for days due to health problems derived from his age and his death has caused a great impact among many religious Jews in Israel, who usually have the elderly rabbis of the community as their spiritual reference.
He was the leader of the Lithuanian ultra-Orthodox community - with hundreds of thousands of members - and head of a major yeshiva (school of Jewish study) called Ponevezh.
He was also one of the spiritual referents of Degel Hatorah, one of the two factions that make up the United Torah Judaism party.
This formation represents Ashkenazi ultra-orthodox - of European origin - and is currently one of the partners that are part of the Israeli coalition government headed by Benjamin Netanyahu.
"Today, the world of Torah, together with all the people of Israel, has lost a wise and renowned leader," the prime minister lamented in a statement in which he conveyed his "sincere condolences" to the rabbi's family.
The Israeli president, Isaac Herzog, also conveyed his condolences and remarked that Edelstein was "a spiritual leader of enormous stature", with great influence among current and future generations.
Edelstein became the religious leader of his community in March of last year, after another elderly rabbi, Chaim Kanievsky, died.
He was born in 1923 in the Soviet Union -in a place in Russia that currently borders Belarus- and emigrated in 1934 to the former British Mandate of Palestine (1922-1948) to end up settling in the city of Bnei Brak. This is today one of the great ultra-Orthodox strongholds of Israel, in the center of the country.
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