UMAN, Ukraine — “Every little thing on this world revolves round Rosh Hashanah,” mentioned Haim Hazin, trying on the crowd flowing via the primary road of the Jewish district on this central Ukrainian metropolis hours earlier than the beginning the Jewish New Yr.
The central Pushkin Road was buzzing with life. Greater than 23,000 pilgrims got here right here from world wide — principally from Israel, america, Britain, and France — to wish on the grave of Rabbi Nachman of Breslov, the legendary founding father of the Breslov Hasidic motion and the grandson of the mythic founding father of Hasidic Judaism, the Baal Shem Tov.
Rosh Hashanah in Uman has been the vacation spot of an annual pilgrimage for followers of the revered rabbi, who died right here in 1810, for many years. Often it includes ecstatic prayers, trance dances, techno music events, and an never-ending kosher road meals feast.
“However this 12 months is totally different,” mentioned Hazin, “as a result of Ukraine is at struggle.”
A Hasidic Jew who left Israel for Ukraine over 10 years in the past, Hazin swung into motion when Russia launched its large-scale invasion of Ukraine in February, serving to evacuate Israeli residents, offering first assist kits to Ukrainian troopers on the entrance, and dispatching an ambulance to the Donbas area, the location of a struggle that began in 2014 and which has seen among the fiercest preventing since Moscow’s dramatic escalation this 12 months.
Seven months later, Hazin was busy troubleshooting as he dealt with an array of preparations for the annual occasion, choosing up calls from pilgrims misplaced on their means, fixing damaged water pipes, and guaranteeing that each one the dinners in dozens of eating halls are cooked correctly.
He mentioned that celebrations this 12 months differed from the norm as no “enormous events” had been deliberate, the sale of alcohol was banned citywide, and the nationwide 11 p.m. curfew meant the nights had been unusually quiet.
Praying For Peace
Lengthy into the summer season, it wasn’t clear whether or not the Rosh Hashanah celebrations in Uman would happen this 12 months. After the Russian President Vladimir Putin launched the invasion, the Ukrainian authorities known as on pilgrims to chorus from making the journey, saying they might not assure their security. Israel’s International Ministry additionally suggested it residents in opposition to coming to Ukraine.
A mid-size metropolis about midway between Kyiv and Odesa, Uman has been comparatively secure in the course of the struggle — however Russian missiles have pounded it twice, killing and wounding civilians. Resulting from its central location, it has shortly crammed with displaced individuals fleeing the Russian onslaught within the east and south.
After prolonged state-level negotiations, Ukraine opened its doorways to the pilgrims, however strict safety measures had been launched, mentioned Iryna Rybnitska, a lawyer from the Rabbi Nachman Worldwide Charitable Basis, which oversees the group of the Rosh Hashanah pilgrimage. The Jewish district was closed off to individuals with out permits for the interval of the celebrations, and order was enforced by quite a few cops.
“Wow, I made it! That is what all of us really feel,” mentioned Merdi Lichter, who flew from Israel to Moldova after which made his technique to Uman overland. He has been coming right here yearly since 1988, and his father managed to go to Rebbe Nachman’s grave in 1971, again within the days when the Hasidic life was nearly non-existent in Soviet Ukraine.
Pilgrims of all ages and walks of life traveled to Uman by automotive or practice from Romania, Moldova, Hungary, Slovakia or Poland, as Ukrainian airspace is closed to business visitors.
The numbers had been reasonably decrease than in years earlier than the COVID-19 pandemic and the Russian invasion, however the air of defiance in Ukraine appeared to rub off on the guests, who weren’t daunted by air raid sirens that sounded a number of occasions a day.
“I’m extra afraid to not have fun Rosh Hashanah in Uman than to return to a war-torn nation,” Lichter mentioned with fun. “Putin needs us to stay in concern, however for us he’s nobody.”
One other pilgrim, Shalom Olefshyts, mentioned he was afraid to journey to Ukraine at first, however later determined that Uman is way sufficient from the entrance strains to be reasonably secure.
“We’re used to air sirens in Israel,” he mentioned. “And this place is particular as a result of it’s protected by Rabbi Nachman”.
A way of solidarity between the Hasidic guests and Ukrainians amid Russia’s struggle on the nation could possibly be finest felt within the streets of the Jewish district throughout an enormous communal prayer for peace in Ukraine. Hundreds of pilgrims raised their palms and raised their voices in tune on the entrance to the constructing that homes Rebbe Nachman’s grave and in entrance of the yellow-and-blue Ukrainian flag displayed on the digital billboard on the district’s coronary heart.
“We’re grateful to the Ukrainian authorities and everyone who made it potential to have fun Rosh Hashanah regardless of this horrible struggle,” mentioned Natan Bennoon, head of the Rabbi Nachman Worldwide Charitable Basis. “We all know what’s struggle and what’s terrorism, and we expect that life has to proceed it doesn’t matter what the enemy needs,” he added.
‘We Get Alongside Fairly Properly’
Some guests spent the final hours of the 12 months 5782 by the Jewish calendar on the Uman market, purchasing for phrases akin to purses, toys for his or her youngsters again residence, and contemporary meals for the New Yr’s desk.
Tetyana, an area resident who has been buying and selling at the marketplace for 20 years and didn’t need her final title printed, made a particular dictionary with names of fruits, greens, nuts, and different merchandise she sells translated into Hebrew and transcribed in Cyrillic.
“We get alongside fairly nicely,” she mentioned as she was greeting one among her long-time purchasers. “We now have Jesus, they usually have Nachman — all of us must imagine in one thing, don’t we?” she mentioned with fun.
Though Hasidism was born in 18th-century Podillya, a historic area in what’s now southwestern Ukraine and northeastern Moldova, many fashionable pilgrims to Uman haven’t any ancestors from Ukraine or are unaware of their ties to the nation – or the bloodstained historical past of Jews in Uman.
Within the mid-18th century, hundreds of Jews dwelling right here had been killed in a violent rebellion of Cossacks and Ukrainian peasants. The Jews of Uman additionally fell sufferer to pogroms in the course of the Soviet-Ukrainian Struggle, across the time of the Bolshevik Revolution, and the Nazis murdered nearly all Jews within the metropolis within the Holocaust.
For probably the most half, followers of the Breslov Hasidic motion started to go to — and in some circumstances immigrate to Ukraine — after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Over the past three a long time, Uman has regained its standing as a middle of Hasidic life in Ukraine. Right now, greater than 100 Hasidic households stay right here.
This doesn’t imply that relations between Uman residents and the massive numbers of pilgrims who come right here yearly are at all times easy.
Points akin to vacationer tax assortment, organizing communal companies, and road noise are a headache, some residents say. Based on Rybnitska, situations of anti-Semitism or disregard for the native inhabitants have occurred however issues are getting higher yearly.
In the meantime, Hazin mentioned that he meets with anti-Semitism extra usually in america and Europe than in Ukraine. He believes that Russia’s struggle in opposition to Ukraine — one of many objectives of which has been by described by Putin, who falsely claims that Ukraine is dominated by neo-Nazis, as “de-Nazification” — will deliver Jews and ethnic Ukrainians nearer collectively.
“The individuals of Ukraine perceive the struggling of a nation that others need to eradicate all too nicely now,” he mentioned.
Previous And Current
On the primary day of the New Yr, pilgrims within the Jewish district carried out tashlikh — the symbolic casting of 1’s sins into the water, which takes place in Uman yearly.
The prayers of the gang gathered by a lake combined with a pointy melody performed on a conventional shofar horn, and the unsettling scream of the air-raid siren. Some males dancing in a circle needed to make room for a navy truck attempting to move by.
A few kilometers away, Anatoliy Tyutyunik, an 83-year-old Uman resident, was driving his bicycle – carrying a bag crammed with early-autumn greens – via a ravine referred to as Sukhoi Yar.
In 1941, between 5,500 and 6,000 Jews had been shot useless on the ravine by the Nazis – a bloodbath that, like Babyn Yar in Kyiv and plenty of comparable mass killings throughout Ukraine in the course of the “Holocaust with bullets” — was solid by the Soviet authorities for many years as focusing on “Soviet residents” fairly than primarily Jews.
Right now there are not any indicators resulting in the Sukhoi Yar in Uman, and it’s hardly ever visited by vacationers. When Tyutyunik noticed a crew filming close to a monument near the location, he stopped and seemed shocked.
“It’s good to know the historical past,” he mentioned with tears in his eyes, recalling the Jewish pals of his youth who left town within the Soviet period and his relations who fled the struggle this summer season. “You may then evaluate the previous and the current and draw your individual conclusions.”
