Last update - 00:00 15/01/2007
Marking the disaster - 170 years later
About a dozen people stood at the memorial stone and prayed. Ze'ev Perl, the historian of Safed and a former mayor of the city, stood to the side and read from a book he had brought with him. "Look what Rabbi Aryeh Ne'eman wrote back then," Perl said, pointing at a quote from a postcard Rabbi Ne'eman sent 170 years ago from Safed to Amsterdam: "Since the day the Temple was destroyed, there has never been such destruction."
About 20 residents of Safed attended the memorial ceremony, which was held at 2 P.M., the exact hour when, on January 1, 1837, an earthquake destroyed the city and 2,000 of its residents - half of the population. Tiberias was also destroyed in the quake.
Safed resident Meir Hameiri decided this year to commemorate the quake's victims. He collected 12 stones from the Old City area, remains from ancient homes, and together with Shlomo Sofer, built a memorial with the following text: "On this hill are buried the bodies of those killed in the great earthquake that hit Safed on the 24th of Teveth, 5597.
This marker was created by the Sephardi elders of Safed, worshippers and followers of the Admor Rabbi Avraham Dov Auerbach of Avritch, whose emotional cry, 'we shall not move from Safed,' has echoed down since the catastrophe of the earthquake to the second Lebanon war."
Hameiri explained that the rabbi's call has affected the city ever since. "He stood and said that this is not the time for crying and for eulogies but for burying the dead, tending to the injured and restoring the city.
"The rabbi said that this city is the place from which the Kabbalah, the Zohar and the piyyutim (liturgical poems) went out, and therefore it is forbidden to leave. It moved the people," Hameiri related.
Moved by the Lebanon war
He is convinced that "through the years, in times of hardship, the residents of Safed remained constant to the rabbi's remarks. That is how it was in the second Lebanon war, too."
Hameiri said it was last summer's war that led him to build the memorial. The site was determined using an old map that indicated that the earthquake victims were buried above the grave of Ba'al Hayisurim.
Shimon Koby, an 11th generation resident of the city, is also convinced that "from the earthquake to the second Lebanon war we always withstood tests of survival. Nearly 500 missile landed on us during the Lebanon war and there was no panic here."
Most of those who attended the ceremony are regular worshippers in the synagogue of Rabbi Auerbach.