Jabotinsky Street in Bnei Brak, the main axis connecting Petah Tikva, Bnei Brak and Tel Aviv, looked like Yom Kippur yesterday.
The road was completely empty of passenger vehicles.
Pedestrians, however, filled it from all directions.
They all went in one direction, to the area of Rashbam Street in the city, the house of the late Rabbi Chaim Kanievsky.
Even before that, from the moment the police announced the closure of the entrances to Bnei Brak starting at 6 in the morning, crowds arrived in the city, in order to arrive in time, and spent the night there.
Thus, on Saturday night, on almost every street one could see young men and young men walking with mattresses in their hands, staying with families who had agreed to host them for one night, until the funeral.
Back to the funeral.
Along with the crowds, we also walked down Aharonovich Street, coming from Ezra Street leading to the area of the rabbi's home.
The vast majority of the marchers at the funeral were ultra-Orthodox, of course, but there were also many knitters.
One of them, Shmuel Shemu, a resident of Givat Shmuel, said excitedly that he used to enter the rabbi every holiday for a blessing.
The cemetery, Photo: Gil Eliyahu / Ginny
"Unbearable loss"
Many walked away with their faces covered in the ground, having a hard time believing what event they were in now.
"The rabbi did die at an extreme age, aged 94," said Binyamin, a kollel student who arrived from Jerusalem at night, "but the loss is unbearable. He held the entire generation on his shoulders. We all, the entire ultra-Orthodox community, were his students. The word and have already been named after him. "
It was evident that the early warnings of an impending catastrophe at the gathering of the masses did their part.
The lessons from the Meron disaster and the Carlin storks disaster (on Pentecost) have been learned.
In many places in the city, screens were broadcast that transmitted a live broadcast from the funeral center, around which thousands gathered, thus avoiding mass concentration, and disasters that, God forbid, could have occurred.
As we approached the rabbi's house, we could still see disturbing plays by young people climbing on temporary roofs and balconies that contained far more than the amount they were supposed to contain.
For this purpose, the megaphones were recruited, who worked overtime and repeatedly announced to the young people to get down from the dangerous places, calls that were eventually answered.
"And you are very much saved for your souls," announced the broadcaster Avi Mimran from "Kol Chai" radio on all the speakers installed in the city.
At the entrance to the streets near the rabbi's house and at the exit from them, there were MDA and Ihud Hatzalah ambulances, ready for any scenario. A few blocks away, MDA also installed two buses for any trouble.
In summing up the incident it turned out that this time, thankfully, there was no need for any of these.
Viewers from the rooftops, Photo: EP
Level the road
On nearby Nehemiah Street, the penthouse owners invited the crowd gathered downstairs to go up to their house, reclaim their souls with cold drinks and food, and the possibility of watching the funeral from above, from the balconies overlooking the crowd.
We too, and we discovered young people from all walks of life in the ultra-Orthodox sector - Hasidim, Lithuanians, Sephardim - are watching with tears in their eyes what is happening at the funeral.
The vehicle of the great man of the intended generation, Rabbi Gershon Edelstein, who eulogized at the funeral, had just returned to the direction of the rabbi's house.
A convoy of policemen forced their way into the crowd, with a proclamation proclaiming, "Respect the rabbi, clear the road."
The request would have seemed almost impossible in view of the much overcrowding, but it happened slowly, and the rabbi and his men were rescued with the vehicle safely.
"Relatively, it was a short funeral," Yehiel, the owner of the penthouse, told me as the funeral was coming to an end. "Meron disaster."
Four hours later, shortly after six in the evening, when most of the huge crowd had long since dispersed to his home, a heartwarming spectacle could be seen in a public garden on Ezra Street in the city: One thing: tea, coffee, cookies, cakes.
"It was your right to help organize the funeral, and now is our time to give it back," one of the neighbors told them.
Were we wrong?
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