Yehuda Meshi Zahav, the director and founder of ZAKA, lost his mother Sora Zisel to coronavirus this week, less than a month after his brother died from a serious illness. The pain of losing his mother is worse however for Meshi Zahav, who says that for ten months his parents were protected “like an Esrog” by their children.
“My mother was perfectly healthy, active, constantly giving, she’d never had a problem with her lungs before.,” Meshi Zahav said in a Ynet interview. “My brother went away before Chanukah and family members made a Chanukah party with my parents. Everyone at the party got sick and she gradually became more sick until she passed away.”
With coronavirus rates skyrocketing in Israel, the Chareidi public is suffering the most from the third wave, with an estimated 1 in 3 of those infected belonging to the Chareidi sector. Meshi Zahav does not mince words about Chareidim who ignore COVID-19 regulations.
“What’s happening in our sector is unbelievable. Whenever someone is sick we always run to the best doctors, to Rabbi Firer, to get the best treatment. What’s happened here? There seems to be a total ‘myopia’ from our leaders. They are worse than Holocaust deniers, since they deny something which happened in the past, but here they are denying something happening in front of us…just to see the families of those sick people sitting in the hospital corridors- so much pain, crying and weeping. I was in a hospital this week and the tissues had run out, I had to go and bring them tissues.
“What happened to our leaders. How can they say ‘our hands didn’t shed this blood’? There are people wandering around who have shed blood. There’s hardly a building or neighborhood without deaths. You walk around Chareidi neighborhoods and see billboards and the names change like movie pictures. Every few hours the signs are replaced with new names of those who have died.
“44 people died yesterday…44 families which will never be the same again – and yet we are lax. Don’t they see? Every person is a potential time bomb. On funeral announcements instead of writing ‘may their memory be blessed’ we should write ‘may G-d avenge their blood’…..Just to hear the cries from the coronavirus department – water, bathroom, nurse -tears one’s heart open. There’s nobody who can tend to them and I sat on the fifth floor and watched ambulance after ambulance taking away body after body.”
Rabbi Benny Fisher, the director of the Magen Lacholeh medical referral organization, also strongly condemned violators of the health regulations as “wild people, two-footed animals.” In a Ynet interview he called on everyone to “go and vaccinate” and to “run away from shuls, closed places, not to send children to schools or Talmud Torahs. The entire educational system must be under lock and key.”
Fisher however stressed that there are violators both among Chareidim and among the secularists. “There must be egalitarian enforcement. The pictures from the beaches on Shabbos are heartrending and so are those from the large wedding in Bnei Brak.”
THANKS SO MUCH,, IT MEANS THE WORLD TO US IN THESE DIFFICULT TIMESֱ
No comments:
Post a Comment