From the Kabbalists of Safed to a Crowd of Hundreds of Thousands

The Meron gathering is documented from at least the sixteenth century, when the kabbalists of nearby Safed, Isaac Luria among them, are recorded visiting the tomb, and it very probably draws on older local custom that is not documented. The Encyclopaedia Judaica traces the growth of the observance and the scholarly discussion of how the date, the site and the figure of Shimon bar Yochai came to be joined, which is not a straightforward matter and involves several traditions converging.

What is clear is the trajectory. Across the twentieth and twenty first centuries the hillula grew from a regional pilgrimage into the largest annual Jewish gathering in Israel, with hundreds of thousands attending a hillside site reached by a small number of roads. That scale had consequences. A fatal crush at the 2021 hillula led to an official inquiry and to a substantial restructuring of how the site is managed and how safety is overseen, and the atlas records that as the reason the present arrangements differ from those of a decade ago. A pilgrimage that outgrows its ground is a recurring problem across traditions, and Meron is one of the clearest recent instances of it. The atlas records the change in management as fact and does not attribute responsibility for the events of 2021, which were the subject of a formal inquiry whose findings belong to that inquiry rather than to a reference article.