Aryeh Deri's wife is nothing if not supportive. Minutes after he was freed from jail yesterday, Yafa Deri was telling a radio interviewer that all of Israel's suffering these past two years stemmed from its appalling mistreatment of him.
It is a measure of the remarkable passions stirred by Mr Deri, the most senior Israeli politician jailed for corruption, that many of her listeners probably agree.
Barely into his 40s, Mr Deri is a highly charismatic man who was once expected to become Israel's first ultra-Orthodox prime minister. He was the driving force behind the biggest success story in domestic Israeli politics through the 1980s and 1990s - the meteoric rise of the Shas party from a marginal Jerusalem-based force into the country's third-largest Knesset faction, currently holding 17 seats in the 120-member parliament.
Brought to Israel from Morocco as a child, he established Shas as an essential component in Israel's coalition governments by galvanising massive support from fellow Jewish immigrants from the Middle East and North Africa.
Though jailed two years ago for fraud, taking bribes and breach of trust, Mr Deri's conviction came after a prolonged police investigation. His supporters claim he was framed by political peers jealous of his success, or that his crimes were no worse than those routinely tolerated when perpetrated by his rivals, Israel's overwhelmingly European political elite.
His wife, not surprisingly, falls into the former category and spoke of him yesterday in almost saintly tones, castigating the political and legal systems for jailing a man whose only aim was to serve the public good. "There can be no doubt," she declared, "that what the people of Israel have undergone from a security standpoint over the past two year is the result of Aryeh Deri having sat in prison."
While the parole board barred him from political activity for the next 14 months and prohibited him from returning to the Knesset for seven years, it did permit him to resume "public" activity - a ruling which gives him sufficient leeway to make his profound influence felt.
In his prime Mr Deri was the maker and breaker of governing coalitions - taking a relatively moderate line on peacemaking with the Palestinians, but never committing Shas to specific positions and thus perpetually destabilising both left-wing and right-wing governments which needed his support to maintain a majority.
He has tightened an alliance with former and would-be next prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu of the hardline Likud. In occasional outbursts during his various appeal hearings he has also displayed a deepening Jewish-fundamentalist and anti-democratic sensibility.