In late February, as the number of confirmed COVID-19 cases in the US had begun creeping steadily toward 1000, rabbis in the reform, conservative, and orthodox schools of Judaism began to warn their followers about the dangers of the approaching virus.
But some Jews in the ultra-orthodox or Haredi sects – the ones featured in the “Unorthodox” and “Schtisel” series on Netflix – were getting different advice. Many were encouraged to go about business as usual by rabbis who told their followers that prayer alone would protect them. On February 27, Rabbi Gamliel Rabinowitz, one of the leading Israeli Haredi rabbis, released an emotional video to his followers in Israel and the United States, telling them that he who worships in a quorum of ten men “is like he's in a protected room, a bunker. It's a bomb shelter, nothing will happen to him, not to him and not to anyone in his family."
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