Rabbi Shlomo Goren (born 3 February 1917, died 29 October 1994), was an Orthodox Religious Zionist rabbi who founded and served as the first head of the Military Rabbinate of the Israel Defense Forces and subsequently as the third Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi of Israel from 1973 to 1983. He was born in Poland and immigrated with his family to the British Mandate of Palestine in 1925. He was raised in Kfar Hasidim, a village of religious Jews near Haifa that his father co-founded. He began studying at the Hebron yeshiva in Jerusalem at age twelve, where he was identified as a prodigy. His first book was published when he was seventeen years old. He served in the Israel Defense Forces during three wars, wrote several award-winning books on Jewish law, and was appointed Chief Rabbi of Tel Aviv in 1968. In 1983, he established a yeshiva in Jerusalem, which he headed until his death.

Rabbi Goren's career was characterized by a commitment to the Religious Zionist values of his youth. He volunteered for the Haganah in 1936, and served as a chaplain for the Jerusalem area during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, during which he tested for and qualified as an IDF paratrooper. Rabbi Goren was eventually promoted to the rank of Brigadier-General. Following the establishment of the State of Israel, Rabbi Goren was appointed Chief Rabbi of the Military Rabbinate of the IDF with the rank of Major-General, a position he held until 1968. Rabbi Goren used the opportunity to help establish and organize the military chaplaincy's framework, streamlining processes to get soldiers accommodations for kosher food and prayer services. Rabbi Goren personally wrote a new prayerbook to accommodate the different prayer styles used by various ethnic groups serving in the army. Rabbi Goren also served in the 1956 Suez Crisis and the 1967 Six Day War, where he was promoted to a full General. Rabbi Goren was on hand during the liberation of East Jerusalem on June 7, 1967, where he gave a prayer of thanksgiving broadcast live to the entire country. Shortly afterwards Rabbi Goren, blowing a shofar and carrying a Torah scroll, held the first Jewish prayer session at the Western Wall since 1948. The event was one of the defining moments of the war, and several photographs of Rabbi Goren, surrounded by soldiers in prayer, have since become famous around the world and particularly in Israel. The most famous photograph shows Rabbi Goren blowing the Shofar against the background of the Western Wall. In 1961, Rabbi Goren was awarded the Israel Prize in Rabbinical literature.

Rabbi Goren attracted many admirers through his passion for Religious Zionism and his combining Zionist activism with a commitment to Judaism and Jewish scholarship. Rabbi Goren spent most of his term as Chief Rabbi of Israel attempting to reconcile Jewish religious teachings with modern problems of the state, including advancements in technological progress. Rabbi Goren was also well known for his controversial positions concerning Jewish sovereignty over the Temple Mount. Rabbi Goren continually maintained that Jews were not only permitted, but commanded, to ascend and pray on the mount. Rabbi Goren accidentally entered Hebron and the Cave of the Patriarchs on June 8, 1967, before the IDF had captured the city, and was greeted with white flags.

Rabbi Goren also made headlines after his term as Chief Rabbi had expired. In 1993 he declared that it was Halachically forbidden to dismantle any settlements in the Biblical Land of Israel, and encouraged any soldiers ordered to do so to refuse. "It is clear that according to Halacha (Jewish religious law), a soldier who receives an order that runs contrary to Torah law should uphold the Halacha, and not the secular order. And since settling the land is a commandment, and uprooting the settlements is breaking the commandment, the soldier should not carry out an order to uproot settlements. This government does not lean on a majority of Jewish support, but rather on Arab votes. According to the Halacha it does not have the authority of a majority, and therefore government directives to uproot the settlements do not have the authority of the majority of the people." (NRP newspaper Hatzofeh, December 19, 1993)

Rabbi Ovadia Yosef (born in 1920 in Iraq) is a Mizrahi Haredi rabbi, Talmudic scholar, and recognized halachik authority. He is the former Sephardi Chief Rabbi of Israel. Rabbi Ovadia Yosef is also the current spiritual leader of the Shas political party in the Israeli Knesset. He is highly revered in the religious world, especially in the Sephardi and Mizrahi communities, for his erudition and Torah scholarship. He is among the most important poskim of the past few generations and is regarded by many as the foremost Rabbinical authority and a source of Daat Torah. He has been referred to as the Posek HaDor ("Posek of the present Generation"), Gadol HaDor ("greatest (one of) the generation"), Maor Yisrael ("The Light of Israel") and Maran. Rabbi Yosef's halakhic responsa are highly regarded within Orthodox circles and are considered binding in many Mizrahi communities, among whom he is regarded as "the most important living halachic authority."

Rabbi Yosef's responsa are noted for citing almost every source regarding a specific topic and are often referred to simply as indices of all previous rulings. Rabbi Yosef has two central projects, intertwined with each other, which are embodied in the slogan "Restoring the Crown to its Old State." The first, a Halakhic project, is an attempt to create a unified Halakhic codex subject to the rulings of Rabbi Yosef Karo. This project is essentially innovative, in that its attempt to unify the various Halakhic traditions in light of the rulings of Rabbi Yosef Karo does not constitute a return to the traditionally accepted Sephardic approach. As part of this project Rabbi Yosef aims to unify the minhagim of the various Jewish groups in Israel by calling upon them to relinquish minhagim and traditions which they practiced in the lands where they resided prior to their immigration to the Land of Israel. His second project, a social one, is to improve the status of Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews in light of the hegemony of Ashkenazi Jews in the Torah world. This hegemony has somewhat diminished over the past few decades, in no small part because of his own political and religious activities.

Rabbi Yosef was born in Baghdad, Iraq the day after Yom Kippur. In 1924, when he was four years old, he immigrated to Jerusalem, Mandatory Palestine with his family. As a teenager he studied at the Porat Yosef Yeshiva, where he advanced to the highest shiur taught by the rosh yeshiva, Rabbi Ezra Attiya. Ovadia received rabbinical ordination at the age of 20. He became long time friends with Rabbi Ben Zion Abba Shaul, who began his yeshiva career in the same class and who advanced to become rosh yeshiva of Porat Yosef in 1983. Between 1958 and 1965 Yosef served as a dayan in the Jerusalem district Beth Din. He was then appointed to the Supreme Rabbinical Court of Appeals in Jerusalem, eventually becoming the Chief Sephardic Rabbi of Tel Aviv in 1968, a position which he held until his election as Chief Sephardic Rabbi of Israel in 1973. In 1970 Rabbi Yosef was awarded the Israel Prize, for Rabbinical literature.

Rabbi Yosef holds a Halakhically ambivalent view towards Zionism as the Atchalta Degeula (beginning of the redemption). In a newspaper interview in which Shas was accused of being anti-Zionist, Rabbi Yosef responded: "What is anti-Zionist? It is a lie, it is a term which they have concocted themselves. I served for ten years as a Chief Rabbi, a key public position in the State of Israel. In what way are we not Zionists? We pray for Zion, for Jerusalem and its inhabitants, for Israel and the Rabbis and their students. What is Zionist? By our understanding, a Zionist is a person who loves Zion and practices the commandment of settling the land. Whenever I am overseas I encourage Aliyah. In what way are they more Zionist than us?"