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For followers of the rabbi Nachman of Breslov, however, Rosh Hashanah is a chance to party. Nachman, a great-grandson of the founder of what is today broadly known as Hassidic Judaism, a branch of ultra-Orthodoxy, spent the final months of his life in the Ukrainian city of Uman, 125 miles (200km) south of Kyiv, and died in 1810.
In 1941, the Germans deported the entire Jewish community in Uman, murdering 17,000 Jews and destroying the local Jewish cemetery, including the burial place of Nachman, which was eventually recovered and relocated to a new place. About 1 million Ukrainian Jews were killed in the Holocaust.
More than 200 years after Breslov’s death, the sect still makes pilgrimages to his tomb on Rosh Hashanah, when it is believed those who pray over it will be atoned for their sins, although today the celebrations often involve loud music, trance-like dancing and heavy use of alcohol and drugs. Ukrainian police on Friday arrested four Israeli nationals suspected of drug possession at a crossing point outside the western Ukrainian city of Vinnytsia, Ynet has reported.
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The arrival of thousands of Jewish pilgrims in Ukraine does not help the Kremlin’s propaganda, which has persistently claimed the need to “denazify” the country since it launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.