‘Everything became silent’: Mossad chief’s haredi brother recalls Meron’s fatal crush

The brother of Mossad leader David Barnea recounted his heartbreaking experience during the April disaster at Mount Meron, which saw 45 people killed in a crash at a religious festival in the northern shrine.

Zohar Barnea, a Haredi man, told Channel 13 how he and his son were caught in the flood of people as a crowded staircase leading down from the shrine became a death trap amid the intense overcrowding.

“I arrived here with my son around 12:40 am. We started the path and got stuck… We stood there for several minutes which seemed like an eternity, ”he recalls, visiting the site again with the network cameras.

“I had a miracle. People around me started to suffocate. I took off my hat and started to give them some air, ”he said, simulating fan movement. “The thing that worried me the most was my son. He was standing a little above me. I kept yelling at him ‘Are you breathing? What is happening, are you breathing?

“I understood that things weren’t freeing, people were coming and going and coming and going,” Barnea said.

The disaster occurred during the annual Lag BaOmer celebrations, which drew some 100,000 worshipers, mostly ultra-Orthodox Jews, despite longstanding warnings about the site’s security and the dangers of overcrowding. Hundreds of people stranded in a narrow passage, where a slippery slope tripped and fell in a human avalanche that left dozens dead and at least 150 injured.

It was Israel’s worst peacetime disaster.

Barnea’s brother David became the head of the Israeli spy agency in May, shortly after the disaster. The two grew up in a secular family. Zohar turned to religion at the age of 13, although he did his military service in the Golani Infantry Brigade and did not become Haredi until later.

Zohar said the two had a very close bond. He had come to Meron especially early this year to pray for his brother’s appointment as head of Mossad. “He has his abilities and his virtues,” he said. “I think he has fully realized the potential of the job.”

Mossad chief David Barnea at a ceremony to take office as head of the agency on June 1, 2021 (Kobi Gideon / GPO)

In Meron, as people crumpled around him, Barnea sort of stood in the middle of the pile-up.

“I felt that I was alone in the world. At that moment I felt, and that feeling stayed with me very powerfully, it was like everything was going silent, ”he said.

“There were people screaming ‘help me’ … It was a terrible sight.”

Barnea and others started trying to help people get out of the hustle and bustle. He remembers helping Avigdor Hayut as well as one of his sons, Shmuel.

“I pulled [the boy out] and started resuscitating him, doing chest compressions, ”he said.

The boy survived, but another of Hayut’s sons and one of his students who had come with them did not survive.

Barnea said he was initially unable to find his son in the midst of the chaos and was blocked by a policeman who was aggressive towards him as he tried to move around.

The crowd moments before the Mount Meron tragedy on April 30, 2021 (Screenshot)

“I finally said to him ‘Look, I was in disaster, I survived, I can’t find my son, you have to help me find him.’ He said to me ‘It’s too bad you didn’t kick it too.’ “

Barnea finally found her son safe and sound, and then “everything hit me. I collapsed. During the first week or the first two weeks, I did not work at all. I literally couldn’t walk. I stopped working, I continued to see the events before my eyes. I am still not myself.

He blamed much of the blame for the scale of the disaster on the conduct of the police, who he said were violent and adversarial throughout. “The feeling was that the cops weren’t there to help us, they were our enemies … Anywhere you saw cops hitting people, it was heartbreaking.”

After the new Israeli government was formed in June, a state commission of inquiry was formed to investigate the disaster. In November, the panel submitted an interim report to Prime Minister Naftali Bennett on Monday, although few details were made public.

Bennett said the government would study the report closely to ensure such an incident never happens again.

“Negligence, management failure, unprofessional appointments cost lives,” Bennett said in a statement from the Prime Minister’s Office.

The report was also submitted to the Department of Religious Services and the Department of Public Safety.

Religious Services Minister Matan Kahana has vowed that next year’s celebrations “will be completely different from past events in Meron and will be conducted to different safety standards.”

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