Large families. Group prayer. Funerals with hundreds of mourners. Social distancing is the antithesis of ultra-Orthodox Jewish life.

The coronavirus is devastating Israel’s ultra-Orthodox communities. They represent 12.6 percent of the population, but 28 percent of infections.

‘How Many Funerals Will Come Out of This One?’

 

JERUSALEM — The crowd surged and swirled, like the eddies of an ocean. Crushed against one another, hundreds of men stretched their arms toward the rabbi’s body, trying to touch the bier in a display of religious devotion.

It was the height of Israel’s third lockdown, in an ultra-Orthodox district near the heart of Jerusalem. Gatherings were banned. Masks were mandatory. Infection rates were spiking, particularly among ultra-Orthodox groups like this one.

Yet here were hundreds of mourners, most with mouths uncovered, attending an illegal funeral procession for a revered rabbi who had himself died of the coronavirus.

For these deeply devout Jews, attendance was a religious and personal duty. To briefly grip the rabbi’s bier, and symbolically assist his passage from this world, was a sign of profound respect for the dead.

But for secular Israeli society, and even for some within the ultra-Orthodox world, this kind of mass gathering suggested a disrespect for the living.

“What is more important?” wondered Esti Shushan, an ultra-Orthodox women’s rights activist, after seeing pictures of the gathering. “To go to funerals and study Torah? Or to stay alive?”

It is a question that channels one of the central conflicts of the pandemic in Israel: the spiraling tension between the Israeli mainstream and the growing ultra-Orthodox minority, an insular group of highly religious Jews, also known as Haredim, who eschew many trappings of modernity in favor of intensive religious study.

When the pandemic began, one Haredi leader promised that adherence to Jewish law would save his followers from the virus......

 BRILLIANT REPORTING: TAKE THE TIME TO READ AND VISUALIZE THE DEPRAVITY!

 https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/02/17/world/middleeast/israel-orthodox-jews-haredim.html