Lag BaOmer

Lag BaOmer is the thirty-third day of the counting of the Omer, the seven-week period between Passover and Shavuot; its name is simply the number, lag (33) ba-omer. The weeks of the Omer are kept in many communities as a period of semi-mourning, in which weddings, haircuts and music are avoided, traditionally in memory of a plague said to have killed the students of Rabbi Akiva; Lag BaOmer is the day the deaths are said to have ceased, and so it becomes a day of release, on which weddings and celebrations resume.

It is associated above all with Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai, the second-century sage to whom the mystical tradition attributes the Zohar, and whom tradition says died on this day, asking that it be marked with joy. His reputed tomb at Meron in the Galilee draws a huge annual pilgrimage, with bonfires, singing and the first haircuts of small boys; bonfires are lit across Israel and in Jewish communities elsewhere, and children play with bows and arrows, variously explained. The 2021 disaster at Meron, in which a crush killed dozens, led to a state inquiry and to tighter regulation of the pilgrimage, part of the day's recent history.

The crush at Meron in April 2021 killed forty-five people, almost entirely ultra-Orthodox men and boys, in a narrow, poorly ventilated passage as crowds attempting to leave one part of the site collided with crowds still trying to enter, and the subsequent Israeli state commission of inquiry identified years of accumulated infrastructure neglect, unclear lines of official responsibility between religious and civil authorities managing the site, and repeated prior warnings about exactly this kind of crush risk that had gone unaddressed before the disaster finally occurred.

Israeli authorities have since imposed capacity limits, restructured entry and exit routes, and required advance registration and ticketing for access to the most crowded areas of the pilgrimage in the years following the disaster, changes that have altered the previously largely unregulated character of a pilgrimage that had operated for generations on essentially open access, and the tension between preserving a spontaneous, mass folk pilgrimage tradition and imposing the kind of formal crowd-safety infrastructure the inquiry demanded remains an active and, for some ultra-Orthodox community leaders, an uncomfortable adjustment each subsequent Lag BaOmer at Meron has had to navigate.