Located on the slopes of Mount Meron in the Upper Galilee near Safed, it falls under the jurisdiction of Merom HaGalil Regional Council.

Meron is most famous for the tomb of Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai, and is the site of annual mass public commemoration of Lag Ba'Omer.

[2] In the 12th century, Benjamin de Tudela visited Meron and described a cave with tombs, believed to hold the remains of Hillel, Shammai, and "twenty of their disciples and other Rabbis".

The current town was founded by the Hapoel HaMizrachi movement in 1949 on the ruins of the depopulated Palestinian village of Meiron, with an initial population of Orthodox soldiers discharged after the war.

[14][16] Artifacts uncovered during digs at the site include a coin of Probus (276–282 CE) and African ceramics dating to the latter half of the 3rd century, indicating that the city was commercially prosperous at the time.

[16] Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell write that Meron was a prominent local religious centre in the period of late Antiquity.

[18] Denys Pringle describes Meron as a "[f]ormer Jewish village", with a synagogue and tombs dating to the 3rd and 4th centuries, noting the site was later reoccupied between 750 and 1399.

[20] On his visit to Meron in 1210, Samuel ben Samson, a French rabbi, located the tombs of Shimon Bar Yochai and his son Eleazar b. Simeon there.

[21] Palestine was incorporated into the Ottoman Empire in 1517, and by 1596, Meron was a large village of 715 located in the nahiya ("subdistrict") of Jira, part of Sanjak Safad.

Edward Robinson, who visited Meron during his travels in Palestine and Syria in the mid-19th century, describes it as "a very old looking village situated on a ledge of bristling rocks near the foot of the mountain.

"[20] The tombs of Shimon bar Yochai, his son rabbi Eleazar and those of Hillel and Shammai are located by Robinson as lying within a khan-like courtyard underneath low-domed structures that were usually kept closed with the keys held in Safad.

[22][26] Towards the end of World War I, the ruins of the Meron synagogue were acquired by the "Fund for the Redemption of Historical Sites" (Qeren le-Geulat Meqomot Histori'im), a Jewish society headed by David Yellin.

[4] Meron was founded as a moshav by the Hapoel HaMizrachi movement in 1949 next to the site of ancient Meiron by eastern European Jews who fought in the 1948 war.

It is a custom at the Meron celebrations, dating from the time of Rabbi Isaac Luria, that three-year-old boys are given their first haircuts (upsherin), while their parents distribute wine and sweets.

[29] On 30 April 2021, 45 people were crushed to death while trying to exit through a narrow passage, at the mass gathering to celebrate the Lag BaOmer, in the deadliest civil disaster in the history of Israel.