אתה לא צריך להיות פיזיקאי כדי לדעת שאתה לא יכול להכניס 100,000 אנשים למרחב שיכול להכיל רק 10,000 איש מקסימום------For more than a decade there have been concerns and warnings that the religious site on Mount Meron in northern Israel was not equipped to handle tens of thousands of pilgrims. In 2008 and 2011, reports by the state comptroller at the time warned of the potential for calamity there.

 שוב, הטיפשים בהנהגה מעמידים את חסידיהם בדרך המוות

Israel Mourns After a Religious Festival Turns Into Disaster

There were warnings for years that the venue on Mount Meron, where 45 people died in a stampede, could not handle tens of thousands of pilgrims.

 

Israeli security officials and rescuers carrying the bodies of victims who died during a festival on Mount Meron in northern Israel on Friday.Credit...Sebastian Scheiner/Associated Press

JERUSALEM — As Israelis mourned on Friday the 45 people trampled to death during a pilgrimage that drew tens of thousands of ultra-Orthodox Jews, questions were already arising about poor planning and possible negligence.

For more than a decade there have been concerns and warnings that the religious site on Mount Meron in northern Israel was not equipped to handle tens of thousands of pilgrims. In 2008 and 2011, reports by the state comptroller at the time warned of the potential for calamity there.

“We will conduct a thorough, serious and deep investigation to ensure such a disaster does not happen again,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu pledged on a visit to the site on Friday. He called for a national day of mourning on Sunday.

Ultra-Orthodox Jews looking at belongings left behind at the site of the crush on Friday.Credit...Sebastian Scheiner/Associated Press

Even for a country accustomed to the trauma of wars and terrorist attacks, this counted as one of the worst disasters in Israeli history.

Israel has been wracked by religious-secular tensions, particularly over the last year during the pandemic, amid widespread anger over what many here viewed as a disregard for regulations and displays of autonomy by parts of the ultra-Orthodox community. The disaster early Friday largely united the country in shock and grief, but it also underlined some of the divisions plaguing this society.

Up to 100,000 people were crammed onto the mountain late Thursday, most having arrived on organized buses to celebrate the holiday. The festivities turned to horror about an hour after midnight, when scores of adults and children were crushed and suffocated in an overcrowded, narrow passageway that turned into a death trap, according to witnesses.

The crush occurred after celebrants poured out of one section of the mountainside compound, down some steps and into the passageway, which had a sloping metal floor. Some people at the front fainted or slipped, causing a bottleneck, witnesses said, and setting off what witnesses described as a “human avalanche.”

One of the injured, Chaim Vertheimer, said that the passageway was slippery from spilled water and grape juice.

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“For some reason, there was sudden pressure at this point and people stopped. But more people kept coming down,” Mr. Vertheimer told the Hebrew news site Ynet, speaking from his hospital bed. “People were not breathing. I remember hundreds of people screaming ‘I can’t breathe’.”

Another of the injured, Dvir Cohen, said a large number of people were trying to leave at once.

“There was a staircase where the first people tripped and everyone just trampled them. I was in the second row of people,” he said. “People trampled on me, hundreds of them.”

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu visited the site on Friday.Credit...Pool photo by Ronen Zvulun

Minutes earlier, thousands of men had been bobbing and swaying on the bleachers in time to music. The Israeli authorities had placed no restrictions on the number of attendees, despite warnings by some health officials about the risk of Covid-19 transmission.

Though the sight of so many people gathered together and unmasked may be jarring to most of the world, life in Israel has returned almost to normal in recent weeks after a successful national vaccination drive.

The majority of the adult population is fully vaccinated. But many in the crowds were under the age of 16 and not yet eligible for vaccination.

It was the largest single gathering in Israel since the start of the pandemic.

By Friday afternoon, many of the dead had been identified and families were rushing to bury them before the start of the Sabbath at sundown. According to Israeli news media, at least two of the victims came from the United States and one from Canada.

Ultra-Orthodox Jews attend a ceremony by Rabbi Shimon Bar Yochai’s grave on Friday on Mount Meron, Israel.Credit...Amit Elkayam for The New York Times

The compound on Mount Meron includes several large gathering grounds with bleachers and stages, connected by a series of alleyways and paths.

The 2008 comptroller report said that all building additions and changes made to the pilgrimage site had been done without the approval of the local and district planning and building committees.

“There are no grounds for permitting the current situation to continue,” one comptroller report said.

The comptroller’s office said that special danger was posed by the access roads and paths, which “are narrow and not appropriate to accommodate the hundreds of thousands of people who visit the site.” It was along one of those paths where witnesses said the crush of people began.

Ultra-Orthodox Jews gathering at Mount Meron on Thursday.Credit...Jalaa Marey/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Mount Meron is near the Sea of Galilee and the mystical city of Safed. The annual gathering there comes on a holiday, Lag b’Omer, that is linked in Jewish tradition to the Bar Kokhba revolt against the Romans in the second century A.D., and for many ultra-Orthodox Jews, it is a highlight of the Hebrew calendar.

But the celebrations were strictly curtailed last year because of the pandemic, with few people allowed to attend.

Large numbers of ultra-Orthodox and traditional Jews make the pilgrimage to the mountain for days of festivities. They light bonfires around the grave site of a second-century sage, Rabbi Shimon Bar Yochai, in the hope that they will receive his blessings on the anniversary of his death.

Despite the warnings that the infrastructure could not safely bear large crowds, one former official, Shlomo Levy, who had chaired the Upper Galilee Regional Council, said he had come under political pressure to cancel a warrant he had issued in 2008 to close the tomb compound because of safety concerns.

Mr. Levy told Kan, Israel’s public radio, that the public security minister at the time told him he was afraid to touch the site and that it was a “hot potato.”

That wariness stems from the disproportionate political power long held by ultra-Orthodox parties in Israel’s coalition system. The ultra-Orthodox have been crucial members of successive Netanyahu-led governing coalitions.

Yossi Elituv, the editor of the ultra-Orthodox Mishpacha magazine, said on Twitter that the ultra-Orthodox community needed “to learn some lessons.” The compound should be taken out of the hands of private religious trusts and associations, he said, and should be run by official state authorities.

Relations between the ultra-Orthodox community and the Israeli mainstream have come under particular strain during the pandemic, as parts of the religious public flouted lockdown regulations and the government and police were often lax in enforcing them.

But in a show of national unity on Friday, Israelis across the nation lined up to donate blood for the injured in response to a call by the emergency services.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/30/world/middleeast/israel-stampede.html

And now a lesson in Dikduk - Hebrew Grammar....

What's the Reason for Hebrew's Mixed-Up Genders?

Quite a few masculine and feminine Hebrew words, when pluralized, take the form of the opposite gender. Why?

 

From “Angelus Novus” by Paul Klee, 1920.

“All inflected languages have irregularly declined nouns; that’s quite common. But I wonder if in Hebrew there is an idea that is embedded in particular irregularities. For instance, why is so essentially masculine a word as avot [fathers] pluralized in a feminine way, or so essentially feminine a word as nashim [women] pluralized in a masculine way? Is there a reason for this?”

The gender and the plural forms of Hebrew nouns, and the relation between the two things, can indeed be both puzzling and exasperating. The two examples cited demonstrate why. The Hebrew word for “father” is av and the Hebrew word for “woman” is ishah; the Hebrew masculine plural ending is –im and the feminine plural ending is –ot; logically speaking, therefore, “fathers” should be avim and “women” should be ishot. And yet, as Silver observes, it’s exactly the other way around. (The plural transformation of the first syllable of ishah from i- to na- is a different sort of anomaly that will be dealt with further on.) What’s going on? And why is it that these exceptions should occur precisely in words whose meanings actively include maleness and femaleness?

Gender itself can be unpredictable in most or all of the languages of which it is a central feature. (In many languages, such as English, it is of little or no importance.) Why is the sun, le soleil, masculine in French while the moon, la lune, is feminine? It cannot be because there is, to the human mind, something inherently male about the one and female about the other, because in German, die Sonne, the sun, is feminine and der Mond, the moon, is masculine. And although there are formal criteria that may determine the gender of French nouns—most ending with an “e,” like lune, are feminine while most ending with a consonant, like soleil, are masculine—there are plenty of counterexamples, such as feminine mer, sea, and masculine nuage, cloud. In both French and German, the gender of many nouns has no obvious relationship to their meaning, sound, or structure and must simply be learned, whether by the college student or the prattling infant.

Hebrew, which is even more heavily gendered than German or French, since its verbs also come in masculine and feminine forms, is no different in this respect. Although it does, like French and German, exhibit certain regular patterns, the gender of many of its nouns appears to be arbitrary. There is no discernible reason why a word like ḥerev, “sword,” should be feminine while its rhyme-word erev, “evening,” is masculine, or why tsinor, “pipe,” should be masculine when tsipor, “bird,” is feminine. Moreover, Hebrew nouns have an additional complication not found in French or German, which is that their plural forms are gendered, too. Thus, pluralized ḥerev. besides undergoing an internal vowel shift, takes the feminine suffix of –ot, so that “swords” is ḥaravot, while erev takes the masculine suffix of –im and “evenings” is aravim.

Brockelmann’s theory, stripped down here to its barest essentials, is but one; there are others. All have their strengths and weaknesses, their challengers and defenders; all draw their evidence from morphological and grammatical details in half-a-dozen or more Semitic languages, and none enjoys wide scholarly acceptance. Meanwhile, you’ll just have to learn these things by heart. And if you’re wondering what is the plural of the masculine Hebrew noun for “heart,” lev, it happens to be l’vavot.

https://mosaicmagazine.com/observation/arts-culture/2021/04/whats-the-reason-for-hebrews-mixed-up-genders/?utm_source=Daily%20Newsletter%20Segment&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Daily%20Newsletter%202021-04-28%20%28SrUEwy%29&_ke=eyJrbF9jb21wYW55X2lkIjogIkw4N0NHaCIsICJrbF9lbWFpbCI6ICJjZW9AZGlhbW9uZGNhcmQubmV0In0%3D