The Uman Rosh Hashanah Pilgrimage

Hasidic groups are ordinarily organised around a living rebbe, and the relationship with him is the centre of the practice. Breslov is the exception. Nachman of Breslov died at Uman in 1810 without appointing anyone to follow him, and his followers have never accepted another rebbe, which left them with a founder who is present only at his grave.

Arthur Green's biography sets out how deliberate that appears to have been, and how much of Nachman's teaching concerns the individual's unmediated struggle rather than reliance on an intermediary. The pilgrimage follows directly from it. Nachman promised that whoever came to his grave, gave a small amount to charity and recited the ten psalms he specified as the Tikkun HaKlali would be helped by him, and he asked his followers specifically to be with him for Rosh Hashanah. Going to Uman is therefore not a devotional extra but the closest a Breslov Hasid can come to the thing that other Hasidim have at home. The atlas records the promise as the movement's own teaching, since it is a claim about what happens rather than an observable fact, and records the practice built on it as attested and continuous. The ten psalms are recited at the grave, the charitable gift is given, and the two days of the festival are prayed through in a complex built beside it. What a visitor sees is a very large number of men praying, singing and dancing in a small Ukrainian town, most of whom have travelled a long way to be at a grave rather than in a synagogue at home.

Uman lies in central Ukraine, and for most of the twentieth century getting there was either dangerous or impossible. Travel was restricted through the Soviet period, the Jewish community of the town was destroyed in the Second World War, and the small number of Hasidim who reached the grave in those decades did so at real risk. The modern mass pilgrimage dates essentially from 1991.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union the numbers went from a few hundred to tens of thousands within a decade, and a purpose built synagogue complex and accommodation grew up around the grave to handle them. That makes Uman one of the largest annual gatherings of diaspora Jews at a single site anywhere, and one of the youngest in its present form despite resting on a two hundred year old instruction. The gathering has continued through subsequent disruption, including the closure of borders during the coronavirus pandemic and the conditions created by the war in Ukraine, with the numbers rising and falling accordingly. The atlas records the pilgrimage as living and its scale as variable year to year, and treats the reported figures as estimates by organisers and local authorities rather than as counts.