Michal Chelbin for M Le magazine du Monde
ReportageUltra-Orthodox Jewish communities are paying a heavy price for the coronavirus. Isolated from the world, led by rabbis reluctant to state directives, these religious enclaves were slow to react to the danger. Their neighborhoods, their cities are the main centers of infection in the country.
There are no more cut off islands from the world. Ultra-Orthodox Jews, the most closed community in Israel, are learning about it. They, the haredim, those who "tremble" before God, are the first victims of the coronavirus epidemic in the country. In Jerusalem, the ultra-Orthodox represent three quarters of the cases of contamination. They were slow to understand that the cloud was casting over them like the others, these lost Jews, secular or traditional, whom they look down on. Their neighborhoods, their cities are the main centers of infection. The army and the police even sealed them off for Passover, the Jewish Passover.
How could it have happened? What to say about this pillar of dogma, Torah meguina ou-matsila ("The Torah protects and saves"), if collective prayer no longer preserves, but kills? Now their rabbis are forced to call for help from the secular state, hated or ignored in normal times. So who failed? Rabbis? Impossible. Their advisers? Their government representatives? Most of them have been confined to their homes for the first time in a month, watching the film of the epidemic, which has infected more than 15,000 people and killed more than 200 people in Israel. To understand how it could have happened. And to know if everything can still become as before.
First contamination peak
This tragic film begins with the festival of Purim, March 10 and 11. In Afoula, in the north of the country, the family of Rabbi Henri Kahn received, as every year, relatives or quasi-strangers who knock on the door and kiss you. She sent treats and meals to the poorest. The government announced on March 9 new restrictions on arrivals at Tel Aviv’s David Ben Gurion Airport, which is almost the only gateway to the country. But who knows, in this community so little connected to the media, and who cares?
In the mixed city of Petah Tikva, about fifteen kilometers from Tel Aviv, where haredim live among other Israelis, Esti Shoshan, 43, four children including three boys, ultra-Orthodox and nevertheless feminist, read in the evening and in the morning with the family the Megillah, the Book of Esther, who saved his people from a massacre in ancient Persia. She helped her teens make up for carnival. Across the country, we took to the streets to celebrate Purim and drink. Few suspect it then, but this holiday will become the first peak of contamination in Israel. As in other Jewish communities around the world, in Brooklyn or London.
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