Uman

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.

The pilgrimage to Uman rests on a specific instruction its central figure gave his followers before he died, not on a general custom that grew up afterward.

A grave visit as religious obligation

Rebbe Nachman of Breslov, founder of Breslov Hasidism, died in Uman in 1810 at a young age and reportedly told his followers that gathering at his grave on Rosh Hashanah specifically was of great spiritual value, a directive his followers have treated ever since as close to a binding instruction rather than an optional custom, distinguishing the Uman pilgrimage from most other Hasidic grave-visiting traditions built up gradually by followers rather than commanded by the figure himself.

Banned, then revived

Soviet authorities suppressed the pilgrimage for most of the twentieth century, and travel to Uman for Hasidic visitors was effectively impossible for decades under Soviet rule. The pilgrimage resumed and grew rapidly after Ukraine's independence in 1991, expanding from a small trickle of visitors to tens of thousands annually by the early twenty-first century.

Continuing through war

Since Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, pilgrims have continued travelling to Uman for Rosh Hashanah despite the conflict, sometimes against the advice of Israeli and Ukrainian authorities and amid direct security incidents near the city, treating the specific instruction attributed to Rebbe Nachman as outweighing the practical risks involved.