Israel | Massive crowd at funeral of ‘Prince of Torah’

(Bnei Brak) Hundreds of thousands of Orthodox Jews attended Sunday, near the Israeli metropolis Tel Aviv, the funeral of the influential rabbi Chaïm Kanievsky, nicknamed the “prince of the Torah”, under high police surveillance.

A key figure in Judaism, Chaïm Kanivesky died Friday at the age of 94, shortly before the weekly Shabbat break, and his funeral took place Sunday afternoon in Bnei Brak, an Orthodox city adjoining Tel Aviv, in the center from the country.

There, the streets were packed with worshipers dressed in black who crowded up the stairs and onto the roofs of buildings to attend the funeral, while police and emergency workers reported “hundreds of thousands” of participants in the funeral procession.

“I cried when I heard he was dead,” said Shlomo Lugassi, a 41-year-old worshiper who unsuccessfully tried to push through the crowd to gain access to the late rabbi’s home in Bnei Brak. “As Jews we know that what holds the (Jewish) people is the Torah, and this man was the Torah, by his knowledge,” he added.

“He knew the Torah better than anyone […] He was a father to all of us, we had someone to lean on to make decisions, we are orphans now, ”added Faygie Ben Shalom, 60 and director of a seminary, who left early Sunday from Jerusalem to attend the funeral with his students.

The Israeli police deployed 3,000 officers, in addition to paramilitaries, for fear of overflows on the sidelines of the funeral, or even collapse of roofs where worshipers were massed.

In April 2021, a stampede during a Jewish pilgrimage bringing together tens of thousands of people led to the death of 45 people, including children, at a site in northern Israel.

But at the end of the day, after the procession and the burial, the rescuers did not report any serious incident, but only minor injuries, such as people who lost consciousness.

“Prince of the Torah”

Wispy white beard and arched back, Rabbi Kanievsky was considered a “master” and sometimes nicknamed the “Prince of the Torah” by his followers who followed his instructions to the letter.

“The rabbi made sure to always receive each person with an open heart. He was a true public leader, who from his modest home in Bnei Brak led tens of thousands of people in Israel, with wisdom, common sense and rare skill,” commented Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, saluting the memory of a man who had “renounced material things to devote himself to the spiritual life”.

“For about 35 years and even more, I was like a son at home,” the leader of the Sephardic Orthodox Shas group, Aryeh Deri, told Israeli television. “Rabbi Kanievsky did not belong to any particular current, he was the leader of all Israel […] Sephardim as well as Ashkenazim, Orthodox as well as secular, he was both a simple and prestigious person”.

Chaïm Kanievsky “has become an authority figure almost against his will. He wanted to learn and study Torah,” but divisions in the Orthodox world led him to take on a greater public role, said Benjamin Brown, a scholar of Jewish thought at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

“He was a very warm, very modest person. He was not an ideologue. He did not come to Orthodox society with a grand vision, but as a problem-solver,” he added.

COVID-19 and Torah

Rabbi Kanievsky, however, drew the ire of many Israelis when he downplayed the severity of the coronavirus, saying the pandemic should not justify the closure of religious schools.

The elderly rabbi had in fact adapted certain practices to the demands of the fight against COVID-19 by closing synagogues and allowing the exceptional use of mobile phones on Shabbat (day of rest) to share urgent information on the pandemic, had indicated to AFP at the end of 2020 his grandson, Yaakov Kanievsky.

But the closure of yeshivot, Talmudic schools, in an attempt to limit gatherings and therefore the spread of the virus, constituted a “red line”. “For him, the most important thing in the world is the study of Torah. Without that, nothing has any meaning,” explained his grandson.