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Hundreds of mourners burst through the gates of a cemetery in the Israeli city of Bnei Brak as Rabbi Chaim Kanievsky was buried on Sunday. Photo by Abir Sultan/EPA-EFE
March 20 (UPI) — Rabbi Chaim Kanievsky was laid to rest in Israel on Sunday as mourners burst through the gates of the cemetery during the burial ceremony.
An estimated 750,000 people attended the funeral as schools were shut down and highways were closed for the ceremony in Bnei Brak to honor Kanievsky, a well-known leader of the non-Hasidic Lithuanian ultra-Orthodox community, who died at the age of 94 on Friday.
“There is a man who weighs as much as the whole rest of the nation,” Kanievsky’s brother-in-law, Rabbi Yitzchik Zilberstein said. “God almighty takes the man who weighs as much as all the people in order to atone for the people of Israel.”
More than 3,000 officers were deployed to the event as authorities were concerned the ceremony could lead to a situation similar to a crowd surge at an ultra-Orthodox festival in the town of Meron in 2021 that left 45 people dead and 150 injured.
“The funeral will be a mass event, and we must make sure that it does not end in a mass disaster,” Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett said on Saturday. “The trauma of the Meron disaster is still fresh in all of us, this tragedy must not be repeated. I ask everyone for personal responsibility, to look after the children in particular.”
Police said that the public would not be allowed to visit the cemetery at the end of the funeral but hundreds of people managed to break through the barriers
At least 37 people who attended the funeral were injured and 15 were hospitalized. A 3-year-old boy was also reported missing, The Jerusalem Post reported.
However, crowds dispersed without further unrest shortly after the end of the funeral.
Thousands also gathered at Kanievsky’s home on Saturday night and also attempted to break through police barriers, leaving former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who visited the property to pay respects, stuck amid intense crowding for more than an hour.
