{"id":582789,"date":"2020-03-29T12:55:18","date_gmt":"2020-03-29T09:55:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ch10.co.il\/?p=582789"},"modified":"2025-08-05T22:23:59","modified_gmt":"2025-08-05T19:23:59","slug":"%d7%a8%d7%90%d7%a9-%d7%94%d7%a2%d7%99%d7%a8-%d7%91%d7%a0%d7%99-%d7%91%d7%a8%d7%a7-%d7%94%d7%aa%d7%a2%d7%95%d7%a8%d7%a8-%d7%a8%d7%a7-%d7%9b%d7%a9%d7%a0%d7%9b%d7%a0%d7%a1-%d7%9c%d7%91%d7%99%d7%93%d7%95","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ch10.co.il\/en\/news\/582789\/","title":{"rendered":"The mayor of Bnei Brak only woke up when he went into quarantine, and why is Ravitz celebrating?"},"content":{"rendered":"Is the Haredi public refusing to obey the instructions intended to curb the spread of the coronavirus? Aharon Rabinowitz, Haaretz's Haredi affairs correspondent, said this morning on 103FM radio about ignoring the Health Ministry's instructions: "The Bnei Brak municipality did not act in time. But when did the mayor wake up? Only when his wife contracted the coronavirus and some of his staff members became infected and he went into isolation. Only then did he wake up." Yaakov Wider, a Likud member of the Bnei Brak municipal council, commented on the broadcast on the funeral attended by members of the "Jerusalem faction" that was held last night in Bnei Brak, in violation of all the Health Ministry's rules - and criticized those who violate the instructions: "This is an anarchist group by nature, which always does the opposite." However, he sought to avoid generalizations: "There are many shades in the Haredi public. The majority of the Haredi public listens to the instructions of the Ministry of Health. The Haredi public is not uniform, there are many shades in it. The majority of the Haredi public is exposed to the general media, and those who are exposed to this media listen completely to the Ministry of Health. There are more closed groups that are not exposed to the media, and these people did not hear the instructions and did not understand the magnitude of the danger." He added: "It is also important to look at a small and extreme faction that I call anarchist. It is anarchist by nature, undisciplined, always doing the opposite of what everyone else is doing. Its definitions are very vague and this phenomenon needs to be addressed." He explained: "It is permissible to desecrate Yom Kippur because of a doubt about pikuach nefesh, here we are talking about absolute pikuach nefesh, not of one but of hundreds and perhaps thousands." He referred to the Ministry of Health's management of the crisis among the Haredi public and said: "I think there was a failure and they understand it. There is an understanding that it made a very big mistake in addressing this public. They should have responded much earlier and much more aggressively - unfortunately, that did not happen." He said that following the Ministry of Health's guidelines prohibiting prayer in a synagogue, "there are gatherings at the entrance to houses, many more than ten people pray in a stairwell. There is also infection there." He continued: "One of the reasons this happened in Bnei Brak is also because it is a very dense city, one of the most dense cities in the country, and also because people come from all over the country to shop. Bnei Brak is the shopping center of the Haredi public, they come from all over the country, there are very long lines at the entrance to the stores." He admitted that "the municipality is dealing massively with the entire issue of enforcement and reports, but the municipality is not dealing with this issue." The council member claimed: "Ultimately, it is about protecting lives. If there is a mass infection here, we will see phenomena that are very far from us, that are happening in the United States and Italy." He emphasized: "We really don't want this to happen in the most densely populated city in Israel, with the highest number of children and the elderly in Israel. We need very aggressive enforcement, to deal with the issue of those anarchist groups, who are not disciplined, very severely," and also suggested handing out fines to "a person who goes to a funeral or wedding that they are not allowed to and a person who gathers." Yitzhak Ravitz, head of the Kiryat Yearim-Telzeston council, said on the program that the spread in the council, which was one of the first prominent centers of the coronavirus outbreak, has been stopped. "There hasn't been a single infected person here for six days," he said. Ravitz spoke about the decisions that succeeded in stopping the spread of the pandemic there: "We had extraordinary cooperation with the residents. "We were several steps ahead of the Ministry of Health and the government and implemented a self-quarantine." Ravitz called on residents in all regions of the country to stay home and prevent the further spread of the pandemic throughout Israel.\r\n\r\n