Secularist Israeli firebrand Yosef Lapid dies

TEL AVIV (Reuters) - Yosef "Tommy" Lapid, a veteran Israeli journalist and politician who campaigned against religious controls in the Jewish state, died of cancer on Sunday. He was 77.

Riding a wave of middle-class ire at the welfare benefits and exemptions from military service enjoyed by ultra-Orthodox Jews as a costly Palestinian revolt raged, Lapid led the secularist Shinui party to major gains in a 2003 election.

Lapid served as justice minister in Ariel Sharon's coalition government, but eventually left in a funding dispute. Shinui ("Change") fell from voters' favor in the next ballot -- a result some commentators blamed on Lapid's public truculence.

Lapid -- who was born in the former Yugoslavia and moved to Israel after surviving the Nazi Holocaust -- made no apologies for his often divisive comments about religious Jews and Israelis of Middle Eastern descent.

"I want justice for the bourgeoisie," he once told Reuters.

Having quit politics, Lapid was a regular guest on talk shows where he defended passionately the unpopular Israeli prime minister, Ehud Olmert, his longtime friend.

Olmert, now the subject of a bribery investigation that could force him from office, eulogized Lapid as "a Holocaust survivor who lived and breathed Jewish fate, Jewish history and the Jewish future throughout his life".

Lapid also served on the board of trustees of Israel's Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial.

"Tommy Lapid was the quintessential Jew, though he disregarded etiquette at times," Olmert said in broadcast remarks.