Rabbi Solomon Gaon; Leading Sephardi Rabbi

Rabbi Solomon Gaon, 82, chief rabbi of congregations affiliated with the World Sephardi Federation. The rabbi was an international spokesman for Sephardic Jews--descendants of those who fled the Spanish Inquisition in 1492--and a world-renowned scholar on their history and interpretation of Jewish law. Gaon was born in Travnik, Bosnia. He began working with Yeshiva University in New York in 1962, and in 1968 he was elected president of the American Society of Sephardi Studies. The same year Gaon delivered the main address at the dedication of the first synagogue consecrated in Spain since King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella’s expulsion of the Jews in the 15th Century. He received Spain’s equivalent of the Nobel Prize in 1990 when he was presented with the Prince of Austurias Concord Prize. He had been chief rabbi of the congregations affiliated with the World Sephardi Federation since 1978. In New York on Wednesday of pneumonia.