An estimated 750,000 Orthodox Jews on Sunday packed Bnei Brak, Israel, for the funeral of influential rabbi Chaim Kanievsky, known to his followers as the “Prince of Torah.”
Authorities had voiced fears of disaster from massive overcrowding as a sea of men and boys filled streets, sidewalks and balconies in the city near Tel Aviv to mourn the Belarusian-born Kanievsky, who died on Friday at the age of 94.
A separate women’s section had been created ahead of the event, which the Magen David Adom rescue agency estimated would be one of the biggest gatherings in “Israel history.”
Photo: Reuters
After Kanievsky was buried at a Bnei Brak cemetery, the rescue agency said that the funeral procession was completed with “no serious incidents.”
Police put the crowd at 750,000, about 8 percent of the Israeli population.
It included Shlomo Lugassi, who said that earlier in the day, he had unsuccessfully tried to push his way through the masses to reach the late rabbi’s apartment.
“I cried when I heard he was dead,” the 41-year-old said ahead of the burial.
Thousands of police and paramilitary officers, as well as volunteers, were deployed to provide security for the funeral held 11 months after a disaster at Mount Meron, an Orthodox pilgrimage site where 45 people died in a stampede.
“The trauma of the Meron disaster is still fresh for all of us,” Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett had warned before his weekly Cabinet meeting on Sunday.
He described Kanievsky’s death as “a great loss to the Jewish people.”
Kanievsky was the de facto head of what is commonly called the Lithuanian branch of 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.
Benjamin Brown, a professor of Jewish thought at Hebrew University, said that Kanievsky “came to be a figure of authority almost against his own will.”
“He wanted to keep learning and studying Torah [quietly]” but accepted a leadership role to help heal rifts within the Lithuanian Orthodox community, Brown said.
Israel’s Orthodox Jews are split among various factions and groups, but Kanievsky was seen by some as a unifying figure.
Aryeh Deri, a political leader and rabbi from the Sephardic group — which has its roots in southern Europe and North Africa — told Israel’s Channel 11 that Kanievsky transcended “definition.”
Kanievsky, despite his prominence, lived in a modest Bnei Brak apartment, where religious texts lined the walls of a small study.
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