Nearly A Year After Jewish Festival Crush, As COVID-19 Surges, Israel Flip Flops Over Rules
The believed secret connection between the Baba Sali of Morocco (left) with Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson of Brooklyn (right) is illustrated with a photoshopped poster to advertise the planned celebrations at the tomb of Baba Sali in Netivot, Israel last week. Photo by Gil Zohar.
(ANALYSIS) After the mismanagement of a popular Jewish festival in Meron, Israel, in which 45 pious Jews were crushed to death in a stampede and tens of thousands more exposed to COVID-19, there was only one reasonable course for the government to follow in advance of last week’s planned mass celebration at the tomb of the Baba Sali in Netivot: Cancel it.
And then flip-flop.
Saying caution was the best policy, Lt. Gen. Nachshon Nagler — the police commander of the Negev region — initially ordered that this year’s “hilula” (merrymaking) for the Moroccan rabbi not take place. But Rabbi Baruch Abuhatzeira — also known as Baba Baruch, the Moroccan-born cabalist and son of the miracle worker Israel Abuhatzeira, popularly called the Baba Sali (Praying Father), who manages his late father’s mausoleum — strongly objected to canceling the annual assembly, which in previous years drew some 100,000 faithful.
Right-wing and Haredi politicians, including legislative members Ya’acov Margi and Religious Zionist Party leader Bezalel Smotrich, were highly critical of Nagler’s order.
Following pressure from the legislative members and a field tour in the blue-collar Negev city on Dec. 30 — led by Peretz Amar, the Southern District police commander who was accompanied by Netivot Mayor Yehiel Zohar, Magen David Adom and representatives of the Baba Sali Association and Fire Authority — the ban was lifted, sort of. The crowds of pilgrims would be capped at 30,000 and all but family restricted to staying outside the tomb itself. The building can house 300.
Interior Minister Ayelet Shaked then transferred NIS 700,000 ($225,000) to the Netivot municipality to enable the police and fire department-ordered safety arrangements. The compromise allowed the 38th anniversary hilula of the revered sage (1889-1984) to go ahead last Wednesday and Thursday — on Shebat 4, 5782, according to the Hebrew calendar.
An estimated 25,000 pilgrims — one-quarter the size of throngs in pre-pandemic times — flocked here to celebrate the death and life of the mystic and scholar affectionately known in Judeo-Arabic as “Sidna Baba Sali,” Our Master Papa Issy.
No one without a COVID-19 green pass was permitted inside the perimeter fence. Only family members were allowed inside the complex itself. Those praying there were reminded by loud speaker to “please pray and leave” after seven minutes.
Police arrested 12 would-be pilgrims for disturbing the peace. A news clip on Kann-TV showed unruly visitors — refused entry because they could not produce a COVID-19 pass — attacking police officers and security guards.
“The paranoia was exaggerated,” said Dror Efrati, who noted there were only a few hundred people present Wednesday night when he was there.
The Arutz 2000 Internet station broadcast a two-hour special on the event. A half-empty bottle of Babi Sali arak, a strong drink believed to facilitate miracles, was clearly visible on the broadcaster's desk.
This year’s celebration was greatly subdued compared to pre-pandemic times — when visitors would drink copious amounts of fiery arak, eat kebabs stuffed into baguettes, consume cotton candy, buy toys and religious souvenirs from the site’s temporary market and ritually throw packages of memorial candles into a bonfire. This year, there was neither the temporary fair nor the bonfire.
As always, the joyous pilgrims prayed for an elevation of the Baba Sali’s soul in heaven. Overcome with religious fervor, many clamored to reach his fenced-off tomb, beseeching the legendary faith healer for their recovery from sickness.
“There are all kinds of Jews here — Sefardi and Ashkenazi, secular and religious, Haredi and religious Zionist — and everybody gets along,” said Eliyahu McLean, born in California, who lived in Netivot for the last five years but now lives in Harish. “It’s in the merit of the Baba Sali and all the other great rabbis buried here that we get along so well. The place has a special character. It’s special to experience the splendor of the living Moroccan and Tunisian Jewish heritage. It’s a central aspect of life in Netivot. The Baba Sali is the most famous, but many of the synagogues and communities in Netivot are centered around the religious legacy of the many ‘tzadikim’ (Jewish saints) who lived in North Africa.”
Scores of apocryphal stories circulate about the Baba Sali’s supernatural powers. By one account, the rabbi placed a drop of water in the mouth of a comatose man considered beyond help by his doctors. The man immediately opened his eyes and soon recovered. According to another story, the Baba Sali blessed a bottle from which arak was poured all day for hundreds of visitors without becoming empty. Another anecdote says the sage healed a 1973 Yom Kippur War soldier who was severely wounded and about to have his legs amputated.
In the same vein, the Baba Sali’s grandfather — Rabbi Yaakov Abuhazeira (1806-1880), also known as the Abir Yaakov and Abu Hasira — fell ill in Egypt while en route from Morocco to the Holy Land. He asked to be buried where he was dying — in the village of Damityo, 3 kilometers (1.9 miles) south of the Nile delta city of Damanhur — rather than interred in Alexandria’s Jewish cemetery. Some Jews connect Abuhazeira’s merit with the Allies’ victory against Field Marshall Erwin Rommel’s Afrika Korps in 1942, during World War II’s pivotal Battle of El Alamein.
While for decades following its independence, Israel was bifurcated along ethnic lines between its Ashkenazi Eastern European founding generation and the 1.5 million Middle Eastern Jewish refugees who came later, the pilgrims to Netivot represent all religious and ethnic streams.
Edited posters place Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson (1902-1994), known to many as the Lubavitcher Rebbe, alongside the Baba Sali, although the two never met in life. Schneerson — who, though born in Ukraine, which was then in the Czarist Empire, lived for much of his life in Brooklyn, New York — is considered one of the most influential Ashkenazi leaders of the 20th century.
Parallel to the celebration in Netivot, a hilula was held Jan. 5 in Brooklyn at the Merkaz Sefarad Chabad under the leadership of Rabbi Eliezer Avtzon and sponsored by Rabbi Hirshel, along with Annette Lipsker and their children and grandchildren.
Lipsker and her sister, Chaya Zaetz, are descendants of the Abir Yaacov, grandfather to the Baba Sali.
The evening featured a live link with Netivot. In both places, traditional Moroccan foods were served, together with live music and singing led by “paiytanim” (singers of liturgical music).
Apart from Chabad Hasidim, groups of Bratzlaver Hasidim were raucously dancing at the celebration. Also present were Ethiopian Jews — some of whom settled in Netivot following the 1991 Operation Solomon, which brought 14,325 Jews from the Horn of Africa in a 36-hour rescue evacuation. Aside from Netivot, many were settled in nearby southern cities, including Gedera, Kiryat Gat, Yavne, Beer Sheva, Beit Shemesh, Ashkelon and Rishon LeZion.
Abuhaziera was the scion of a leading rabbinical family in Tafilalt, Morocco — an oasis in the Sahara Desert along the caravan route from the Niger River to Tangiers. He immigrated to Israel in 1959. Like many Sephardic Jews who flooded Israel in the years after its establishment, he was settled in a remote development town in the Negev Desert.
Abuhazeira was directed to Netivot, then a three-year-old ramshackle slum 12 kilometers (7.5 miles) east of the Gaza Strip. There he secluded himself in his home, where his disciples would gather to receive his blessing, especially for healing. Today Netivot has evolved into a modern city of 35,000 linked by a railroad to Tel Aviv and Beer Sheva on the train line that joins it with the other nearby former development towns of Ofakim and Sderot.
The Baba Sali’s white-domed, neo-Moorish mausoleum, located in a park and palm forest developed by the Jewish National Fund, is a magnet for some 800,000 visitors annually. The most popular day is the hilula observed on Shebat 4, which in 2022 was Jan. 6.
The Baba Sali’s son, Baruch Abuhatzeira, entered politics and was elected deputy mayor of Ashkelon. While he was subsequently tried and sentenced to five years imprisonment for corruption and bribery, that jail term didn’t besmirch his father’s status. Released early, Abuhatzeira joined the Baba Sali during the last three months of the saint's life. Today he and other family members continue the group’s tradition.
Gil Zohar was born in Toronto, Canada and moved to Jerusalem, Israel in 1982. He is a journalist writing for The Jerusalem Post, Segula magazine, and other publications. He’s also a professional tour guide who likes to weave together the Holy Land’s multiple narratives.