Our plans for this past Shabbos were all worked out by Thursday morning. Six yeshiva friends of my twenty two year old son were going to attend Lag B’Omer festivities at Mt. Meron Thursday night, and would come to us early Friday morning and stay for Shabbos.

On Thursday evening, a private bus took a group of local young men to Meron, and on it were ds22, ds15 and ds13, who were anticipating an enjoyable ‘brothers trip together.

Since ds22 had been to Meron in the past, he knew what to expect. They agreed on a meeting place and time in case they were separated, and decided to daven maariv (evening services) and get a bite to eat before heading to the Toldos Aharon hadlaka (bonfire). It was this decision that saved them from being right in the middle of what turned into Israel’s biggest civilian catastrophe. A simple decision, a fifteen minute delay….

They davened, and while they ate something quick, an announcement was made that something had just happened. (It would be an hour before the extent of what had just happened would be made public.) They said some tehillim, and them continued with their plans, on to the Toldos Aharon bonfire.

They got there to the sights and sounds of dozens of ambulances and police cars, a helicopter overhead – and bodies being pulled out. It was exactly here that 45 people died and 150 others were injured. They saw numerous people on stretchers being rushed to the ambulances; on one stretcher the paramedic was performing cpr while other paramedics were running the stretcher to the ambulance. My sons later told me it was a scene out of a horror movie, with fear, confusion and screaming all around.

I later found out (from the parent of a young man who was there) that my twenty two year old took charge of the crowd, and led them in reciting tehillim. Every time a body was brought out, he called out blessings for a refuah sheleima, joined by others.

When the announcement was made that people had died, the atmosphere at Meron changed in an instant. All music and dancing ceased immediately, replaced by tehillim, crying, screaming. Everyone was ordered to leave – at least 100,000 people. But there was no plan, no clear evacuation directions. People were told to go in one direction and ran there, to be told they had to go in the other direction and then ran in that direction. No cars were allowed in, no buses were allowed in. There was almost no cell coverage, people couldn’t call for help, look up directions, or contact family members whom they were separated from.

My boys had come on a privately chartered bus that was waiting in the parking lot some distance away to take them back. Shuttles usually run people back and forth to the parking lots. When a shuttle came by, they asked the driver if he was going to that parking lot. Yes, yes, he assured them, and told everyone else who got on he would take them to where they needed to go.

But he didn’t. He drove in an entirely different direction and insisted they all get off at a highway intersection six kilometers from the parking lot. My sons couldn’t get back to the bus in time, and couldn’t call to ask their driver to wait due to the lack of phone coverage. And so they waited on the side of the highway for hours. While they waited, the fifty+ people stranded flagged down private cars (no one was going in our direction so our boys couldn’t get a ride), but the empty buses that went by were waved on by the police.

At 5 am I woke up to a a call asking if I could pick them up (they didn’t want to wake me up so waited until they thought I’d be getting up), that Meron had been evacuated due to an emergency situation. I had no idea yet about what had happened, but I got in the car as fast I could and at 7 am was there.

We knew that ds22 had friends somewhere there and I wanted to take them as well, but they were in a different area and again, there was no cell reception to reach them. We found out a few friends were on a bus to a different city, and we drove to that city to pick them up.

One of the boys that I picked up had been present in the crush, and wanted to spend Shabbos at home (after coming to our home to sleep for a few hours). Two others were on a bus that was turned back right after the event, and never got into Meron. We ended up with two friends for Shabbos instead of six, one of whom was thirty feet away and saw everything unfold outside the structure where the people had been trapped.

When I checked the news Sunday morning, it was like reading about a completely different event than the eyewitness reports I heard.

What those attending all said – that I didn’t see discussed at all in the English news – was that the sole exit from the Toldos Aharon hadlaka was blocked by a gate put up by the police. At the same time that more and more people were allowed in at the entrance, no one could get out, leading to a deadly crush and numerous people dying of suffocation.

**Edited to add: I obviously wasn’t there, I’m not claiming this the only truth about what happened. But it was interesting that this was completely missing from the news, when this is what everyone we talked to who was there firsthand talked about. Maybe those people were confused, maybe they all made the same error about what happened – though we spoke to people directly after the event, when they had no access to phones, news, social media or to one another. I heard from only a few directly but from my son’s yeshiva alone, there are approximately 100 boys who were closer up and more directly involved, several of whom where in the very front of the crush where the bodies piled up. One managed to pull himself over the barrier and then pulled people/bodies out for the next half hour from a small exit that couldn’t be directly accessed by those inside (he was then hospitalized for shock and emotional trauma). He saved the lives of three people. Another was at the very front and saw the person next to him suffocating, and pulled him up so he could get air – and the person died in his hands five minutes later. These people saw the blocked exit right in front of them, they saw the bodies piling up all around them. This isn’t hard information to verify; many, many people were there and all say they were trapped.

Someone my boys met on Shabbos told them that someone near him fainted and the barrier was put into place in order to evacuate him, and as they put the barrier into place, this man asked to be let out and they put the barrier back right behind him – he was the last one out. Many people from the outside, including the police, tried to remove this gate when they saw people were trapped but it was a riot gate and it’s activated by pressure (if I understood correctly). They did succeed in pulling down some aluminum siding that allowed some people to file out. Please be clear that I have absolutely no desire to point fingers at anyone, and I’m not playing reporter. I’m noting the huge discrepancy between what I heard about and what I read about. If this is even partially true – and I put my trust much more in people who were there sharing their first hand experiences – it’s obvious why it’s not being written about, since the outage and anger about this catastrophic human error would be overwhelming. **

I was deeply disturbed that regardless of what really did or didn’t happen – at a time that one’s natural instincts call out for unity and compassion – the media instead chose to create a narrative that would place the blame on the victims themselves, on the charedi community, sowing dissension and hatred.

Many people were there and unharmed – but not unaffected. My ds22 saw some younger guys from his yeshiva crying when he got there, and went over to talk to them. One told him, sobbing,’I just saw ten people die in front of my eyes.’ There were so many aspects of this that have created a psychological toll that will need to be addressed.

For our family, it helped that my boys were all there together, and for the younger ones, that they had an older brother who they trusted to take care of them in the midst of complete chaos. I think this is a huge part of why they’re processing everything as well as they are.

My fifteen year old is very angry – angry that this happened, angry that the police he encountered afterward seemed to have no concern for those there and didn’t do anything to assist them, when they had the power to do so. This didn’t come out of nowhere – he shared with me things he saw and heard that were upsetting.

It was hard for me to hear the intensity of his feelings, but I’m relieved he was able to express some of his pent-up emotion. It would be unhealthy if he kept it in and didn’t talk about it at all, and anger is a normal response for what he saw. We’ll continue to discuss this as time goes on. There’s a time to talk about giving the benefit of the doubt and this is a constant topic in my home, but this wasn’t the time to talk about that.

Everyone processes in his own way. With my thirteen year old, I shared the list of those who died, each one a tragedy of its own, and discussed the role that G-d plays in a disaster like this.

With family members who weren’t there, we discussed the guilt of feeling relieved when we heard that our family members were safe, knowing that others didn’t share that experience.

I don’t know how to close this post – because in the face of so much anguish, anything I can say is trite and inadequate. Our hearts and prayers are with all of those who experienced loss of loved ones, who were injured, or who were traumatized by the events they experienced.

Avivah