MERON

yeshiva and entrance to Tomb of Shimon bar Yohai, Meron, courtesy, TheYeshivaWorld.com

Meron is a town in northern Israel with a population of 985 as of 2019. Located on the slopes of Mount Meron in the Upper Galilee near Safed, it falls under the jurisdiction of the Merom HaGalil Regional Council. The town is most famous for the Tomb of Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai, a rabbi renowned for his mysticism who, it is alleged, wrote the kabbalistic book, the Zohar, and is adjoined to an ancient yeshiva. The tomb is the site of the annual mass public commemoration of Lag Ba'Omer.

In the Bible, Meron is mentioned as the site of Joshua's victory over the Canaanite kings and its subsequent allotment to the tribe of Naphtali. Josephus fortified Meron in the 1st century CE and called the town Mero or Meroth. It is mentioned in the Talmud as being a village in which high-quality olive oil was produced and many sheep were reared. It has been suggested that merino, the celebrated wool, may have had its etymological roots in Meron. In the last decade of the 3rd century CE, a synagogue was erected. Known as the Meron synagogue, it survived an earthquake in 306 CE, though excavations at the site indicate that it was severely damaged or destroyed by another earthquake in 409 CE. It has remained in ruins ever since and has become a major landmark. Some time in the 4th century CE, Meron was abandoned for reasons as yet unknown but was later reoccupied some time between 750 and 1399. In the 12th century, Benjamin de Tudela visited Meron and described a cave with tombs, believed to hold the remains of Hillel, Shammai, and "twenty of their disciples and other Rabbis". The French Rabbi Shmuel ben Shimshon, while on a visit to Meron in 1210, located the tombs of Shimon Bar Yochai and his son Eleazar b. Simeon. He also stated that there were 336 other tombs, and outside of the village, the tombs of Simeon Ḥaṭufah and of the prophet Obadiah. From the 13th century onward, Meron became the most frequented site of pilgrimage for Jews in Palestine. In the early 14th century, Arab geographer al-Dimashqi reported that Jews and possibly non-Jewish locals travelled to celebrate a festival, which involved witnessing the sudden and miraculous rise of water from basins and sarcophagi in the cave. A similar scene was also described by the 15^th century Italian rabbi, later Chief Rabbi of Israel, Ovadiah di Bertinoro, the Italian traveler Rabbi Moshe Basola in the 16^th century and by the American archaeologist Edward Robinson in the 19^th. It has been a custom at the Meron celebrations, dating from the time of Rabbi Isaac Luria, that three-year-old boys are given their first haircuts (upsherin), while their parents distribute wine and sweets. It was reported that during the earthquake of 1837, the walls of the tombs of Rabbi Eleazer and Rabbi Shimon were dislodged, but did not collapse. Laurence Oliphant visited Meron sometime in the latter half of the 19th century. His guide there was a Sephardic rabbi who owned the land that made up the Jewish quarter of the village. Oliphant writes that the rabbi had brought 6 Jewish families from Morocco to till the land, and that they and another 12 Muslim families made up the whole of the village's population at the time.

Towards the end of World War I, the ruins of the Meron synagogue was acquired by the "Fund for the Redemption of Historical Sites" (Qeren le-Geulat Meqomot Histori'im), a Jewish society headed by David Yellin.

Today, the modern moshav Meron is located at the foot of Mt. Meron, and is affiliated with the Ha-Po'el ha-Mizrachi Moshavim Association. Founded in 1949, near the yeshivah and remnants of the ancient Meron synagogue, by immigrants from Hungary and Czechoslovakia, it specialized in hill farming, with deciduous fruit orchards, dairy cattle, and poultry.

On July 14, 2006, a Katyusha rocket fired from Lebanon exploded in Meron, claiming 2 lives—Yehudit Itzkovich, 57, and her 7-year-old grandson Omer Pesachov—and injuring four others. A new barrage of rockets hit Moshav Meron on July 15; there were no injuries.

Among the local attractions are the Meron Vineyards. Meron is conducive to growing grapes for wine as a result of its 600-meter altitude and chalky soil. The vineyard was first planted in 2000 and is part of the Galil Mountain Winery, headquartered in nearby Kibbutz Yiron.