The Great Synagogue of Jerusalem will be closed for the first time in the Jewish New Year due to the new coronavirus, the government announced Wednesday, as the Israelis are ready for a moment of blockade.
Israel has recorded the highest rate of coronavirus infection in the world in the past two weeks, according to an AFP count, and is the first country to impose a momentary national shutdown.
The measures announced through Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will enter into force on Friday afternoon, hours before the start of the New Year’s Festival known as Rosh Hashaná.
The three-week blockade is expected to remain in place during the Jewish holidays of Yom Kippur and Succot, an era in which synagogues are regularly filled with the faithful.
The Board of Directors of the Great Synagogue announced the close of the New Year on a Wednesday published on its website.
The Israeli government has issued rules to restrict the number of worshippers founded on the length of a building, meaning that, in theory, it can accommodate about two hundred people.
“But we don’t have to take any chances,” The president of the Great Synagogue, Zalli Jaffe, told the AFP.
The sacred site regularly receives between 1,100 and 1,7,000 worshippers for each jewish holiday service.
“We have never closed since its inception,” said Jaffe, 67, who has been praying in him since childhood.
Built on the foundations of a much smaller synagogue, it opened in 1982. As an official cult position of the Jewish state, the Israeli president historically attends Yom Kippur.
The outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic caused the Great Synagogue to open in March, and its doors have been maintained ever since.
Israel recorded nearly 167,000 coronavirus cases and 1,147 deaths out of a population of nine million.
Under the new Israeli measures, maximum places of worship will be allowed to accommodate up to 10 more people at a time.
On Wednesday, the authority administering Jerusalem’s Muslim holy sites announced that the Al-Aqsa mosque compound would be closed by closure.
Jordan is the father of the complex, for Muslims like Haram al-Sharif, or sacred sanctuary, and as the Temple Mount through the Jews.
This is just the moment when the Waqf authority has made the decision to close the complex since Israel occupied East Jerusalem in the 1967 Six-Day War.