46 Killed, 150 Injured: How Celebration Turned To Tragedy In Meron

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Last night, amid the celebrations of Lag Ba’Omer in Meron, an absolute unthinkable tragedy occurred: An unstoppable stampede of people began to slip down Har Meron, crushing men young and old, and r”l children, to death. At least 46 people have died, and emergency responders say 150 are injured.

Right now a field hospital has been set up in Meron and ZAKA & Hatzolah are doing all they can to treat the wounded and gather the remains of the killed. The names of the dead & missing have not been released yet – cell phones are down and chaos is in full swing. The phones of the dead are ringing incessantly with “Mom” and “My dear wife,” as families frantically search for their loved ones.

Soon the shock of the event will calm down and nearly 50 families will be in mourning. They will have lost their sons, their fathers. Donations collected by the Vaad HaRabbanim here will go toward helping them to cope with the blow of this horrific tragedy. Widows now left with large families of children will need our help to replace the income of their fallen husbands. Children will need therapy to deal with the horrific trauma. THEY NEED OUR HELP TO SURVIVE THE DAYS TO COME!!

PLEASE DAVEN FOR THOSE WHO ARE INJURED & MISSING – INCLUDING YOSEF AZRIEL BEN CHAYA MICHAL, A 16-YEAR-OLD BOY IN CRITICAL CONDITION.

Klal Yisroel should never know such tragedy again



32 COMMENTS

  1. We’re an exceptional people but commonsense rules for safe, proactive crowd control apply to us, too. We too often brush off lessons learned and risk new tragedies, R”L.

    • Multiple eye-witness accounts have attested that police blocked off this exit, despite the increasingly desperate pleas of those crushed within the closed-off area to remove the barrier.

    • Please stop trampling on other yidden.
      This is the time for love and peace no matter how you look or where you go.

      • Yidden are here to SERVE HaShem. We function on a different plane and in a different world than the rest of creation. When 45 ovdei HaShem are taken away from us, and THEIR avodah ceases, we have to think if we realize our job is AVODAH or if we just think we keep Shabbos, we keep kosher, we learn, etc. That’s how Yidden behave in THIS world, with little or thought about the fact we live FOR a different world, not for this one.

  2. They should publish a detailed map of the location, showing elevations and how many people were packed into what amount of space. Were any exists blocked? Was anyone pushing? Any engineering reports as to why any structures collapsed? More importantly, why did this happen now of all the other years: was this some kind of a sabotage either by the judenrat or by their proxy the islamonazis? We have to get to the bottom of this, so that the proper safety hishtadlus can be arranged for the future.

  3. BARUCH DAYAN HAAMES
    they were holy pure neshamos haamakom yenachem eschem bsoch shar aveilei zion Yerushalayim.
    Hashem should help the families of this terible tragedy

  4. There’s a video titled, “Bystanders watch in horror as police attempt to pull bodies…”
    I didn’t watch the video so I don’t know what it’s about.

    I hope that Matzav didn’t actually post such a grotesque video. Do you have no rachmanus on the victims and they’re families?

    • If you mean the natural reason(s) – overcrowding, neglegence of the police, or bad planning by the government agencies – the RaMBa”M says that is achzoriyus. If you mean what WE need to as a reaction, the RaMBa”M once again says ours is to cry out and turn to HaShem. He doesn’t say any particulars. That seems very telling.

  5. Some points
    This year was different.
    As lag bomer came out Friday so everyone wanted to be there Thursday nite. So it was doubly overcrowded.
    The second reason is that politicians pushed to have unlimited access in light of Covid. In the song everyone sings that there was no sign of a rainbow but today Israel has turned into sodom with rainbow flags. Hamaven yovin. Where are our so called religious MK members twisting arms to stop this. Remember who sold out to Oslo and caused 1000 Jews to be blown up. Never forget. The judenrat is alive and well.

  6. Bottom line is the police caused this tragedy. Not overcrowding. For some unknown reason, they stopped up the one exit. Video evidence and eyewitness testimony corroborates this. How come those policemen have not been arrested? Everyone in Israeli is arrested and held for questioning for minor infractions…how come they have not been? American organizations need to put as much pressure on Israeli officials as possible. The only thing Israelis understand is pressure. Enough with the collective time of mourning; it is time to put pressure on the Israeli government to stop the next police injustice perpetrated on Torah Jews.

  7. If this stampede was caused by a few judenrat policemen blocking the exit, why didn’t our people just walk all over the evil rodfim? There’s nothing that five policemen can do against an organized thousand-strong crowd that’s directly face to face with them. Nothing short of a military unit armed with heavy weaponry can stop such crowd. Again, the exit was blocked by only five puny policemen. Unfortunately, instead of plowing through the judenrat capos and unblocking the exit, it seems that our people got scared of a police pepper spray threat, which is ridiculous, as one would think that a danger of dying from stampede outweighs a pepper spray. However, since we do not consider ourselves as one unit, the minor personal considerations took over the major considerations for others: yes dying from a stampede is more dangerous than a pepper spray, but not if another guy is doing all the dying – some of us would rather that another Jew gets stampeded to death so that they may not experience a much smaller inconvenience of getting pepper sprayed and possibly arrested. We have to change our mentality to describe ourselves simply as a Jew, as opposed to a member of this group or that group. We have to start behaving as one unit. When everyone is mevatel himself for the good of the unit, then everyone’s chances of survival are going way up.

      • A lack of attention span on your part does not necessarily constitute a lack of sense of what you are trying to read.

    • I imagine your a big shot tough guy. quick to overestimate your power. but really youre a moron. if the police were attacked by charedim how do you think that would play out? you think the Israeli government would whimper into their corner and drop their issues? all that would lead too is strict government interventions. but what else can you expect from a big talker.

      • Dear 11:46pm, I won’t reply to your silly personal insults since it has nothing to do with the point I would like to convey. As far as your argument that capitulating and crawling under a rock will save anyone – such “strategy” might or might not save you personally, but the tsibur will invariably suffer, as any enemy gets more emboldened when they see no resistance. Every predatory animal’s hunting instinct gets activated when it sees a potential prey running away. The judenrat are a predatory animal. Now they will try to kill even more because it was so easy for them this time. Therefore, your promotion of getting killed without resistance has only one somewhat logical explanation: to perhaps save your own personal gluteus maximus at the expense of everyone else. Something like this cynical joke: running away from a bear doesn’t require running faster than a bear, but it does require running faster than other members of your tour group. You illustrate my point: you don’t believe in Am Yisroel being a one unit, and therefore the best you can imagine is running away personally. You have no vision; you are like a guy that goes to a five star restaurant and orders a cheap hotdog. You are a fool and a traitor.

  8. Yidden! Don’t fall for all the blaming “causes” and finger pointing!
    We all have to remember: this is all a direct message of Hashem.
    We are living in times of השראת דינים.
    COVID whether its over or not, was just a sign.
    It has been such a hard year for all. How many korbanos!
    Lets hope this was the final כפרה via רשב”י!

    • Dear 11:12, so when you carelessly walk away from your car while it’s running unlocked and a ganov comes over and drives off with it, do you say “no blaming causes”?! Do you say that your leaving the car unlocked had nothing to do with it being stolen?! Everything is a direct message from H’, which doesn’t mean that we have a right to be careless with the cause and effect of the physical world. Pointing fingers now serves a purpose of devising better safety procedures in the future. One such safety procedure should be not allowing Israeli police by our events. Another safety procedure is to teach our community how to fight as a group, and not to run away when another Jew is attacked.

      • While I agree there has to be changes and we need to do Hishtadlus bederech hateva. However, this to happen at the very day place and time of simcha is a shattering message that every Yid needs to be shaken to the core.

        Please do NOT divert from the message.

        • Dear 2:28, how am I diverting the message?! If anything, uniting and acting as one unit is not just a physical world solution, but more importantly a spiritual one!

        • Look how Kohanim did everything in their avodah carefully, “by the book”.
          Look how meticulous the Agudah was in organizing the last Siyum HaShas and the others before it.
          Holy events need to be arranged to maximize safety “bederech hateva”, by people who know how to do that, and we should not have to count on nissim to offset poor coordination, preparation and execution. Doing less than that takes our precious neshamos lightly.

  9. there are reports that pokice blocked an exit to assist victim of a heart attack. things went crazy after that.

  10. We’ve all known or heard of successful family businesses that expanded well beyond the size the family could manage using its familiar methods. The ones that remain successful find ways to deal with the very different needs of a large company. It doesn’t matter how the unique Meron event was managed back when it was much smaller. Accounts I’ve read suggest that, in recent years, the expanded attendance put this event on the edge of disaster before. No matter how pious and well-intentioned you are, you can’t organize and manage these things solely by an act of will. Now, we’re in the finger-pointing stage, where everyone involved seems to want to deflect blame onto others whom they never got along with anyway, or to make it seem like a mystery. Lots of things can set off a stampede, so don’t set the stage for it!

  11. I keep on thinking that it’s just one year ago that we were losing Yidden daily r”l. The terrible besurois were coming in one on top of the other. We all made commitments to change. We promised to cut down on simcha (both size and expense), take our davening and learning seriously, etc. We made all kinds of kabolos. What happened? As soon as things quieted down bez”H, we quickly went back to our old ways. We are back at frivolous expenses, talking by davening, etc – how quickly we forgot.
    So it seems that we needed a new wake-up call, another reminder; call it a booster shot. This one hurt again – tremendously r”l.
    Just as the many “cheeyuvim” ended their “aveilos” year – we now have once again a new batch of almonos, yesomim, and aveilim.
    So what are we thinking now? Will we go back to those kabolos we made then in earnest or will we just go back to business-as-usual in a few days?
    It gets me thinking – and hoping. May we never ever experience such tragedies again c”v. It’s up to us individually and collectively.
    Count me in.

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