Lag Ba’omer, always a time of celebration and partying, turned into a day of tragedy and grief this year when the country woke up on Friday morning to one of the worst civilian disasters in Israeli history.
Special news broadcasts relayed the grim tidings of dozens of people crushed and asphyxiated to death at Mount Meron, the burial place of Tannaitic sage Rabbi Shimon Bar Yochai, where annual celebrations commemorating the anniversary of his death are staged, and where members of the haredi (ultra-Orthodox) community gather in the tens of thousands.
Many of the victims came from the hassidic Toldot Aharon community, whose bonfire lighting ceremony was adjacent to the site of the disaster. The dead included young men, children and fathers who leave behind large families.
What precisely happened at Mount Meron after midnight on Thursday night is still not clear.
Some eyewitnesses say that the police blocked off an exit path from the main courtyard, which led to a mass of people stuck behind them and ultimately the crush in which at least 45 people died.
Others maintain that the police were not at fault, and that a few among the thousands of people stuck trying to make their way out through a narrow, slippery pathway on a decline fell over, which led to a mass of others falling behind them causing the crush.
Whatever the exact circumstances, the general problems at the site were well known, the dangers readily apparent, and the writing was apparently on the wall.
Indeed, a police report from 2016 addressing the Meron pilgrimage titled “Erasing the Writing on the Wall” highlighted the inadequate infrastructure at the site, its small size and the huge number of people who congregate there for the annual celebration.
“The area of the site is not appropriate for the event, the crowd that comes to the mountain is excited and includes people of all ages, and at the time of a disaster it would be difficult to control,” said the report.
And a report three years ago on the Haredim10 news website reported problems specifically at the site where Thursday night’s tragedy happened, under the headline: “Who will prevent a disaster at the bonfire lighting ceremony of Toldos Aharon?”
AS IN previous disasters in Israel, such as the Carmel Forest Disaster in 2010, the problems were known in advance but no action was taken until the unthinkable became reality.
Similarly, in the 1997 Maccabiah bridge collapse, shortcuts and cheap solutions were used to construct infrastructure that was wholly inadequate for the job with insufficient oversight.
No one who has ever been to Mount Meron for Lag Ba’omer, or at any other time of the year, would be at all surprised that such a tragedy could have happened, given the hundreds of thousands crammed into such a small and inadequate space.
This pattern of ignoring problems until it is too late, and of failing to tackle concerns even when there is forewarning, has once again led to a new tragedy in a country that has seen too much heartache during its short lifetime.
With the nation in the midst of perhaps its worst-ever political crisis, eyes will always turn to the unstable nature of the system of government here, which lends itself to frequent changes of ministerial personnel and a subsequent inability to look beyond the short term because of the frequently changing political landscape.
At the same time, questions should also be raised, once again, about the country’s relationship with the haredi sector, especially the more radical groups.
It may well turn out to be that mistakes were made by the police in the management of the pilgrimage this year, which led to the disaster.
But as indicated by the 2016 police report, the site is totally unsuited for a mass pilgrimage – regardless of what the police might be able to arrange on the mountain.
DEMANDS ARE now being heard that limits be placed on the number of pilgrims allowed to visit Mount Meron on Lag Ba’omer, but such a step would face enormous opposition from the haredi communities, which are so devoted to the celebrations there.
Even last year on Lag Ba’omer, at the height of the COVID-19 crisis when mass gatherings were deadly even without mass, close-quarter events, hundreds of haredi men, many from the most radical sects of the community such as Toldot Aharon, evaded police cordons and roadblocks, disregarded Health Ministry regulations, and fought with police to ensure they could celebrate on Mount Meron.
And the entire duration of the coronavirus crisis saw the government struggle, and in large part fail, to impose its authority on large portions of the haredi community, with the period bearing witness to the largest incident of mass civil disobedience in the country’s history, when tens of thousands of haredi children went to school in defiance of government orders.
Should the government limit the celebrations on Meron to say 50,000 worshipers, the country would witness more mass civil disobedience every year on Lag Ba’omer, particularly among the extremist haredi groups.
As witnessed in the COVID-19 crisis, confronting such problems is something the government shies away from, due to both political difficulties and the societal combustibility of such issues.
Nevertheless, the Meron disaster must lead to serious introspection and soul-searching – however difficult – not just about Thursday night’s tragedy, but more broadly over how the country is managed, how it can both identify and tackle short- and long-term problems, and how the relationship between the state and its different sectors needs to change.
Failure to conduct such self-accounting would desecrate the memories of those who perished in the Lag Ba’omer disaster.