Versailles wedding hall disaster

Common card · No. 227215

At 22:43 on 24 May 2001, a large portion of the third floor of the Versailles Wedding Hall collapsed in Talpiot neighborhood, in Jerusalem, Israel. Twenty-three people fell to their deaths through two stories, while another 356 were injured to varying degrees. The disaster is among the deadliest civil disasters in Israeli history, with only the 2010 Mount Carmel forest fire and the 2021 Meron crowd crush having a higher number of deaths. In the aftermath of the disaster, the Israeli parliament passed the "Versailles Law" establishing a special committee responsible for treating the people injured in the disaster and an investigative committee was established by the then-prime minister Ariel Sharon under the leadership of the former judge Vardimos Zeiler, which probed both the Versailles disaster and the unrelated Maccabiah bridge collapse which had occurred several years earlier. Eli Ron, who invented the Pal-Kal construction method, and three engineers involved in the construction of the...

Read on Wikipedia · Image דב רנדל / IDF Spokesperson's Unit, CC BY-SA 3.0