Sephardic Chief Rabbi of Israel David Yosef met with the family of Ran Gvili, an Israeli and Portuguese hostage who has been declared deceased. He emphasized the importance, according to Jewish law, of continuing efforts to bring Gvili's body back for the land of Israel.

Rabbi David Yosef is the son of the late former Israeli Chief Rabbi and Shas spiritual leader Ovadia Yosef. He is known for his extensive writings on Jewish law , most notably the multi-volume work Halacha Berurah, and also serves as the head of the Yachveh Da'at Kollel and a member of the Shas Council of Torah Sages.

In turn, Ran Gvili is a symbol of Sepharad and a great-grandson of Eduardo Nada, a "protected Spaniard" in Alexandria. Nada was born in 1904, in Egypt. The country was experiencing various political upheavals when he went to the Spanish consulate. He claimed Sephardic origins. He left no doubts to the evaluators. It was enough to hear him speak, mixing Spanish, Portuguese, Greek and Turkish words. The mark of Sefarad was inscribed on all his intriguing person. He did not live in Madrid, nor in any city in that country then plunged into a state of civil war. He had never even set foot in that territory. However, he had a right that he exercised. He wanted to survive the political upheavals that kept shaking Egypt, and he survived.

Eduardo would marry Esther Nada, born in 1912. They were the parents of Eliam Nada (1947), who would move to Israel and marry Meir Ziuni (1942). From this marriage was born Tali Ziuni (1970) who married Izaak Gvili (1964). Their son is the last hostage Hamas must return.

For millions of Jews like Eduardo, life has never been easy, and one day, the return of the remains of his great-grandson, Ran Gvili, also came to depend on the diplomatic efforts of a nation from Sepharad, in this case Portugal, whose citizenship he requested. Gvili is the dead
hostage that Hamas must return. It is the last and in fact, it is also the first.

Many will say that his name is not Carlos, nor does he have the surname Silva, or that he never came to Portugal, but pocketed a passport of convenience. However, he used a right granted since 1981 to all descendants of communities of Portuguese origin and, if he came to live in Porto, he would not live on subsidies, nor would he clog the national health services, and much less would he be entertained by setting fire to garbage bins, bus stops and assaulting people. He was an officer of the law. He worked, always.

On the day he died, Ran rushed out of the house to work, with his shoulder broken in an accident that had occurred weeks earlier. He was a police sergeant. He joined his colleagues to rescue the terrified young people fleeing the Nova music festival and to confront the murderous mob that invaded Israel on October 7, 2023. His life, short though it was, was significant.

His family history is the history of a good part of the Jewish people. After the forced abandonment of Judah, two millennia ago, Ran Gvili's ancestors settled in the Iberian Peninsula, in a year that no one can say, through which the Romans, the Germans, the Muslims, and the Visigoths passed. The Treaty of Tordesillas was perhaps the greatest symbol of the potentates who settled in Castile and Portugal. Kingdoms of Catholic origin, with peoples who had the city of Jerusalem as their spiritual homeland, conglomerated a significant Jewish population, which then constituted a vast portion of the world's Jewish population of 1 million souls, according to the Jewish Encyclopedia. In his Book of Genealogies, Abraham Zacuto says that 120,000 Spanish coreligionists arrived in Portugal in 1492, joining a Jewish population of about 80,000 people, according to the estimate of Lúcio de Azevedo, one of the great Portuguese historians of the beginning of the last century.

There is no doubt that the relationship between Portuguese Jews and Catholics was not always peaceful, but the results perhaps surpass the known antagonisms. People of non-Catholic origin were then called Payas and this nickname ended up establishing itself as a factor of pride for the Sephardic population in the diaspora, to the point that many used it as an official name, including in the family of a famous ‘Russian oligarch’ who is neither an oligarch nor a Russian, and the Oporto Jewish community prefers to call him - according various names from his family - "Mr. Abel Benjamin Rocha da Leiva Leja Rosa Abramovich" or call him with the nickname "Mr. Two Hundred and Fifty Euros, thank you".