CEO of the Leumit health care group Nissim Alon urged on religious authorities on Sunday to cancel this year's Passover and Ramadan events.
"Passover [celebrations] could kill people. Saving lives takes precedence over Passover, and the rabbis need to get into the issue," Alon said.
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In a conversation with Israel Hayom, Alon warned that "the Passover holiday should be cancelled, and celebrated with the nuclear family only, in isolation, not the extended family. This is a matter of life and death. If it were up to me, I would cancel Passover. No massive shopping trips, no [public] dish-cleaning services. It's all a lot of traffic outside the home."
Alon argued that if Passover celebrations were not cancelled, the country could see the same rate of coronavirus spread that resulted from Purim activities earlier this month.
Despite government restrictions, 400 people gathered in Bnei Brak Saturday night to attend a rabbi's funeral. The ultra-Orthodox city is now one of Israel's epicenters of COVID-19 due to 'unhealthy skepticism of established medical science.' Ariel Levin-Waldman reports: pic.twitter.com/ejizsjSSZ1
— i24NEWS English (@i24NEWS_EN) March 29, 2020
"Passover can't happen in a time of coronavirus, or we'll see the same story as we did with Purim. Purim should have been cancelled. It cost me half a million shekels ($140,000) to cancel the Purim party for Leumit employees, because I was afraid that if one [infected] staff member was there, a third of the organization would be sent into quarantine. But the parties went on, in both the religious and the secular sectors. That mistake is behind us," Alon said.
While the holiday itself cannot be cancelled, Along is urging Israel's rabbinical and medical authorities to put out orders for it to be celebrated in the embrace of nuclear families, who already live together, without visits to the extended family.
Alon says he saw a rise in the number of coronavirus patients Leumit was treating in the ultra-Orthodox strongholds of Jerusalem and Bnei Brak before the Health Ministry published numbers indicating that those two cities led the country in the number of corona cases.
