Eliyahu Bakshi Doron

Rabbi Eliyahu Bakshi-Doron
Position	Sephardi Chief Rabbi of Israel
Began	1993
Ended	2003
Predecessor	Mordechai Eliyahu
Successor	Shlomo Amar
Other	Sephardi Chief Rabbi of Haifa
Personal details
Born	1941 Jerusalem, Mandatory Palestine
Nationality	Israeli
Denomination	Sephardi Orthodox Judaism

Eliyahu Bakshi-Doron (born 1941), is an Israeli rabbi. He was the Sephardi Chief Rabbi of Israel from 1993 to 2003.

Eliyahu Bakshi-Doron was born in Jerusalem, to Ben Zion Bakshi-Doron and Tova Bakshi-Doron. His parents had immigrated from Iran and are of Iranian Jewish origin. He has an older brother, younger brother and a sister. As a young man, Eliyahu studied in several prominent Religious Zionist yeshivas. He continued his education at Yeshivat HaDarom, Chevron Yeshiva, and Kol Ya'akov.

In 1970, Bakshi-Doron started his rabbinic career in the neighborhoods of Ramat Nasi and Ramat Yosef in the coastal city of Bat Yam. He would be appointed to Sephardi Chief Rabbi of the city in 1972, and in 1975, the larger city of Haifa, where Bakshi-Doron remained for 18 years.

In 1993, Bakshi-Doron became the first non-Iraqi Sephardi Chief Rabbi of Israel since Ben-Zion Meir Hai Uziel in 1954. He served his term concurrently with his Ashkenazi counterpart, Yisrael Meir Lau.

Bakshi-Doron came under fire by the Israeli Reform Movement in 1996 after a sermon in which he compared the movement to the biblical Zimri, who was killed by Pinchas for cohabitating with a Midianite woman. Bakshi-Doron dismissed the uproar as a publicity stunt, saying it was "unthinkable" that anyone would consider his speech an incitement to murder. He was attacked again by Reform leaders in 1999 after some comments he made about assimilation in the Reform community being comparable to the Holocaust.

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