Huge crowds turn out for funeral of ultra-Orthodox Israeli rabbi

BNEI BRAK, Israel, March 20 (Reuters) – The funeral of a revered Israeli rabbi on Sunday drew half 1,000,000 mourners clad in conventional ultra-Orthodox garb, turning the streets of a spiritual suburb of Tel Aviv right into a surging sea of black.

Rabbi Chaim Kanievsky, a number one authority on Jewish legislation, died on Friday on the age of 94 in Bnei Brak, an ultra-Orthodox metropolis close to Israel’s industrial capital.

Parting the large crowd, dozens of police fashioned a phalanx across the van carrying the sage’s physique because the automobile crept in the direction of Bnei Brak’s cemetery.

“(Kanievsky’s) dying is a large loss for the Jewish individuals,” Prime Minister Naftali Bennett wrote on Twitter, interesting to mourners “to not crowd collectively or push”.

Police estimated the gang in Bnei Brak at round half 1,000,000 individuals. The power erected barricades across the cemetery to restrict the variety of individuals on the graveside.

Hours earlier, police closed off highways round Bnei Brak to common visitors to accommodate fleets of buses ferrying mourners to town.

Israel’s Magen David Adom ambulance service was additionally on excessive alert, with reminiscences nonetheless contemporary of a stampede final Could at a crowded Jewish non secular competition in northern Israel through which 45 individuals have been crushed to dying.

Kanievsky, born in what’s now Belarus, made headlines in Israel firstly of the COVID-19 pandemic for defying authorities authorities and saying that ultra-Orthodox colleges should stay open. He later relented, saying preservation of human life outweighed conventional practices.

Extremely-Orthodox Jews make up about 12% of Israel’s inhabitants of 9.4 million.

Reporting by Jeffrey Heller; Enhancing by Mark Heinrich and David Clarke

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