Get email notification for articles from Naama Riba Follow May. 2, 2021 4:31 PM Photographer Yehoshua Shuka Glotman first attended the annual hillula for Rabbi Shimon Bar-Yochai (Rashbi) in 1983. After almost 40 years of attending the Lag Ba’omer celebration, he gathered the photos together for a book that was published last month – prior to the tragedy overnight Thursday that left at least 45 people dead at this year’s event on Mount Meron. “The intensity of the experience was overwhelming and left a strong impression on me,” he writes in the text accompanying his book about the event. “To me, the masses celebrating enthusiastically under the open sky in the heart of the Galilee landscape resembled the camp of the Children of Israel in the desert. The colorful and vibrant sight I witnessed was dizzying; order and chaos intermingled. I was really intrigued by it,” he states. The last Lag Ba’omer event he attended at the tomb of the second-century rabbi was in 2018.