More than a thousand people turned out to One Flame Concert and Art Fest organized by Yeshiva Temimei Darech in Tzfat, Israel.
Held on Thursday high up in the Metzudah Gardens of Tzfat, the crowd joined for an evening of Lag BaOmer unity and celebration in view of Meron.
Organizer Rabbi Shalom Pasternak said he was overjoyed both with the turnout and the atmosphere created by the program, the first of a kind for his 10-year-old yeshiva for baalei teshuva.
Musical acts Alex Clare, Zusha and Ari Lesser all played to ecstatic audiences, sometimes sharing the stage with each other.
To add to the excitement of the affair, a wedding took place on the grounds just before the musical acts took to the stage.
The groom, Natan Rosenbloom and his bride Elisheva, held their wedding on the grounds of the concert festival near the stage between first and second acts, around 7 p.m.
Rabbi Pasternak officiated the Chuppah with the concert crowd, including bride and groom’s own guests and some of their families in attendance. It was pre-planned and it was the idea of the couple, who were called to the stage to bless the whole crowd later on in the evening.
The first sheva brachot were held around midnight after the music finished, with people sitting together on the lawn, joining in. Natan is planning on joining the yeshiva’s semicha program with the couple settling in Tzfat.
“We’re in shock,” said Pasternak, who leads the only baalei teshuva yeshiva for English-speaking young men in northern Israel with Rosh Yeshiva Rabbi Ariel Gorenstein.
“The event was a true celebration of life. The achdus [unity] between the musicians and the crowd together with the chasuna [wedding] in the middle of everything, no one knew what hit them. It was an avalanche of kedusha.”