Nachman of Breslov (1772-1810), great-grandson of the Baal Shem Tov, died of tuberculosis in his thirties and was buried at Uman in Ukraine.
He chose the place. Uman held the mass graves of Jews killed in the massacre of 1768, and he wanted to lie among them. He also told his followers that whoever came to his grave at Rosh Hashanah, gave charity, and recited ten specified psalms would be helped by him. That promise is the foundation of the pilgrimage.
Breslov is unusual among Hasidic movements in having appointed no successor. Nachman remains the rebbe, and the grave is therefore not a memorial to a past leader but the address of the current one.
Suppression
The Bolsheviks closed the town to pilgrims and the visits went underground, at real cost:
- 1934: sixteen of those who came were killed and twelve exiled to Siberia.
- 1938: twenty-seven men.
- 1948: eleven.
Return
Travel reopened at the end of the Soviet period and the numbers rose steeply, a few hundred in 1989, past ten thousand by 2000, around twenty-five thousand by 2008, roughly forty thousand by 2018. The pilgrimage is overwhelmingly male.
Its scale has changed Uman itself, a provincial Ukrainian town that receives tens of thousands of foreign visitors over a few days each year, with the frictions that implies and a local economy substantially built around it.
Closed borders and a war
In 2020 Ukraine closed its borders against the pandemic days before Rosh Hashanah, and thousands of pilgrims who had already travelled were stranded for weeks in the no-man's-land at the Belarusian frontier.
Since the 2022 Russian invasion, both the Ukrainian and Israeli governments have urged pilgrims not to come, on the straightforward grounds that a dense gathering of tens of thousands of foreigners in a country under missile attack, with nothing like adequate shelter, is a target. Ukraine has restricted entry in some years.
Tens of thousands have travelled anyway. The reasoning offered is not that the war is exaggerated but that the promise attached to the grave was not made conditional on the journey being safe: and, from some, that Jews have reached this grave through worse.
It is a rare instance of a pilgrimage that has grown during a war rather than paused for one.