Tragedy near Bnei Brak: 12-Year-Old Moshe Yosef Miller collapses and dies near protest

Moshe Yosef Miller, a 12-and-a-half-year-old boy from the Biala Hasidic community in Beit Shemesh, collapsed on the Givat Shmuel bridge along Route 4 near Bnei Brak in what authorities describe as a horrific tragedy.

Miller, a ninth-grader from the Machnovka-Belz Talmud Torah, was just months shy of his bar mitzvah. His father is a respected Torah lecturer at a local yeshiva, and his grandfather is Rabbi Gedalya Shlomo Zolden, a dayan in the Satmar-Vizhnitz court in Haifa.

According to Bechadrei Haredim, Moshe Yosef had no connection to the nearby protest by the "Hartzufnikim" faction, which was taking place on route 4. He had traveled by bus from Beit Shemesh to Bnei Brak when he reportedly became frightened by police presence, triggering a collapse linked to his epilepsy.

Emergency teams from United Hatzalah and MDA rushed to help him. They tried to revive him with CPR and five defibrillator shocks before taking him to Schneider Hospital. He was in critical condition and unconscious when he arrived, but doctors couldn’t save him and confirmed his death.

United Hatzalah volunteers Moishy Kreutzer and Gedalya Waldman said, “We got there and heard he’d passed out during the protest. We did all we could with resuscitation.” Yonatan Israeli from ZAKA, who showed up later, added, “He had serious head injuries. It looks like it was a medical issue.” ZAKA is now helping the family and cleaning up the scene.

The police called the protest illegal, saying some people yelled things like “Nazis” at officers and stopped cars from getting through. A police spokesperson said, “We’re moving traffic to other roads and getting stuck cars out. Protests are fine, but they have to follow the law: we won’t let it turn into chaos or put people at risk.”

Baruch Dayan HaEmet.