3/18/12

Times Travels to Uman and Rabbi Nachman of Breslov's Grave

Our son Yitz told us he did not like one of the pictures in this story about Uman in T the Times' Travel magazine. We said, what is Uman?

In "One Schlep Forward" Gideon Lewis-Kraus explains in a funny story from his forthcoming book - A Sense of Direction: Pilgrimage for the Restless and the Hopeful - that it is a gathering in the Ukraine of 50,000 Jews:
The big event, we’d heard, was at the Tzion, Rabbi Nachman’s grave, at noon before the start of Rosh Hashanah. Rabbi Nachman of Breslov was a great-grandson of the Baal Shem Tov, the founder of Hasidism. The three generations following the death of the Baal Shem Tov saw the Hasidic movement — populist, ebullient, mystical, messianic — splinter into all of the sects that jostle up against each other in Brooklyn today, each of which has had its own rabbinic lineage; Nachman’s adherents, called Breslovers, however, have promoted no leading rabbi since Nachman himself, and have thus been called the “dead Hasids.”

Before his death in 1810, Nachman told his followers that if they came to visit his tomb on the holiday and repeated 10 particular psalms, he would grant them redemption in the world to come...
We'll go one day, if they have good golf courses nearby.

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