Tens of thousands of Breslev Hasidic Jews intend to fly to Ukraine, to the town of Uman, in order to attend the yearly ceremony near the grave of their rabbi.
This is generally an extremely crowded event, and the people in charge of public health in Israel want to prevent this madness from taking place, in the days of COVID-19. The believers explicitly say that their visit to the place is more important than everything else (I guess that’s why it’s called “believing” and this is the difference between “believing” and “knowing”).
On top of that, the Israeli government and Prime Minister Netanyahu are on the horns of a dilemma: They know this event should be stopped, but their partnership with the ultra-Orthodox parties is at risk, so who cares.
One more point that no one talks about: The tens of thousands of male believers are typically accompanied by a tiny amount of a couple of hundreds of female believers. Those are nowhere to be heard – neither in the news, nor in the photographs (God forbid). Luckily the Corona virus does not distinguish between men and women, religious and secular. It loves crowded gatherings, though.