Huge crowds turn out for funeral of Israeli ultra-Orthodox rabbi
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Ultra-Orthodox Jewish men and children gather outside the home of late rabbi Chaim Kanievsky, ahead of his funeral on March 20, 2022.
PHOTO: AFP
BNEI BRAK, ISRAEL (REUTERS, AFP) - The funeral of a revered ultra-Orthodox Israeli rabbi drew huge crowds of mourners to a religious suburb of Tel Aviv on Sunday (March 20), with police expecting hundreds of thousands of people to attend.
Rabbi Chaim Kanievsky, a leading authority on Jewish law, died on Saturday at the age of 94 in Bnei Brak, an ultra-Orthodox city near Israel’s commercial capital.
Police closed off highways around Bnei Brak to regular traffic hours before the funeral to accommodate fleets of buses ferrying mourners to the city.
A senior police officer said that while some Israeli media predicted that up to one million people would flock to the funeral, police had deployed in accordance with the force’s own estimate that crowds would be about half of that.
Israel’s Magen David Adom ambulance service was also on high alert, with memories still fresh of a stampede last May at a crowded Jewish religious festival in northern Israel in which 45 people were crushed to death.
In Bnei Brak, large numbers of religious men, wearing traditional black hats and suits, stood shoulder-to-shoulder in streets leading to the cemetery, as other residents squeezed onto nearby balconies.
Israel’s Channel 13 TV put the number of mourners at 750,000, without citing a source for the figure.
Rabbi Kanievsky, born in what is now Belarus, made headlines in Israel at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic for defying government authorities and saying that ultra-Orthodox schools must remain open. He later relented, saying preservation of human life outweighed traditional practices.
Ultra-Orthodox Jews make up about 12 per cent of Israel’s population of 9.4 million.
Rabbi Chaim Kanievsky, a leading authority on Jewish law, died on Saturday at the age of 94 in Bnei Brak, an ultra-Orthodox city near Israel’s commercial capital.
Police closed off highways around Bnei Brak to regular traffic hours before the funeral to accommodate fleets of buses ferrying mourners to the city.
A senior police officer said that while some Israeli media predicted that up to one million people would flock to the funeral, police had deployed in accordance with the force’s own estimate that crowds would be about half of that.
Israel’s Magen David Adom ambulance service was also on high alert, with memories still fresh of a stampede last May at a crowded Jewish religious festival in northern Israel in which 45 people were crushed to death.
In Bnei Brak, large numbers of religious men, wearing traditional black hats and suits, stood shoulder-to-shoulder in streets leading to the cemetery, as other residents squeezed onto nearby balconies.
Israel’s Channel 13 TV put the number of mourners at 750,000, without citing a source for the figure.
Rabbi Kanievsky, born in what is now Belarus, made headlines in Israel at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic for defying government authorities and saying that ultra-Orthodox schools must remain open. He later relented, saying preservation of human life outweighed traditional practices.
Ultra-Orthodox Jews make up about 12 per cent of Israel’s population of 9.4 million.
Rabbi Kanievsky was the de facto head of what is commonly called the Lithuanian branch of ultra-Orthodox Judaism, and his knowledge of Jewish law was so revered that his rulings were thought to require total compliance within his community.
To some followers, he was known as "our master, the Prince of Torah", comprising the religion's laws and traditions.
Israel's ultra-Orthodox Jews, or haredim, are split among various factions and groups, but rabbi Kanievsky was seen by some as a unifying figure.
Mr Aryeh Deri, a political leader and rabbi from the Sephardic haredi group - which has its roots in southern Europe and North Africa, rather than the Middle East - said rabbi Kanievsky transcended "definition".
He "was my rabbi", Mr Deri told Israel's public Channel 11 television on Saturday.
Despite his prominence, rabbi Kanievsky lived in a modest Bnei Brak apartment, where religious texts lined the walls of a small study.
His notoriety within Israel and abroad surged in 2020 when he was accused of encouraging followers to ignore social distancing restrictions and continue gathering to study Torah.
A Jerusalem Post op-ed accused rabbi Kanievsky of committing an act of "civil disobedience" unprecedented in Israel's history, at a time when the rest of the Jewish state was required to isolate.
Widespread resistance among some haredim to respect restrictions, including orders to close schools and houses of worship, fostered deep resentment among mainstream Israeli society.
Mr Yaakov Kanievsky, the rabbi's grandson and top adviser, told AFP at the time that the rabbi had not been not seeking to appear "defiant" in response to Covid-19 lockdown rules.
But he stressed that for a prominent haredi rabbi like his grandfather, limiting viral transmission could not be not be the main consideration.
"For the rabbi, the most important thing in the world is the study of Torah. Without that, there is no point to anything," Mr Kanievsky told AFP in November 2020.
"The rabbi believes that the Jewish people have no existence without Torah. You can't separate the two, you must study."
