A two-century pilgrimage to a grave in central Ukraine has outlasted empires, the Soviet Union, a pandemic, and four years of full-scale war. This week the streets of Uman filled again. The question is not only who comes. It is what the gathering now means to pilgrims, to a city under martial law, and to governments that cannot quite decide whether to bless it, police it, or warn people away.
Key Takeaways by Planet Today
The scale this week: Ukrainian officials and Jewish community groups reported between 45,000 and about 50,000 pilgrims in Uman by 11 September 2026, higher than the 35,000-range recorded in 2023–2025. Rosh Hashanah 5787 begins at sunset on 11 September and ends after nightfall on 13 September.
Why Uman, not Jerusalem: Breslov Hasidim treat Rabbi Nachman of Breslov’s grave as the site he asked them to gather at for the New Year. The obligation is spiritual, not touristic. That is why closed airspace and land borders have not ended the trip.
The security contradiction: The U.S. Embassy told American citizens not to go. Ukraine cannot guarantee safety. Israeli and Ukrainian police still deployed together. Pilgrims still came.
The political overlay: In Israel the pilgrimage collides with the haredi draft fight and with arguments over state money spent on logistics. In Ukraine it collides with wartime strain on a small city and with Russian information campaigns that try to cast the visitors as a privileged caste.
What the dancing is: It is not a required Rosh Hashanah rite. It is Breslov practice. Nachman taught joy as a religious duty. The songs on Pushkin and Sadova streets are the public face of that teaching.
What is happening in Uman this week
Tens of thousands of Hasidic Jews have again filled a modest city in Ukraine’s Cherkasy Region. They pray at a white-walled gravesite, sing in the streets, and dance in circles that look, to an outsider, like a festival dropped into a war zone. They are there for Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. Most of them are men. A smaller number of women and children have arrived as well. Organizers and local officials had spoken for weeks of 40,000 visitors. By Friday morning, Ukrainian Jewish community channels and regional police were citing figures closer to 45,000, with some Israeli officers putting the crowd still higher.
The latest official snapshot came as the holiday began. Ukraine’s State Border Guard Service had already counted more than 31,000 organized arrivals by 10 September, with 13,700 crossing on a single midweek day. Traffic piled up at land crossings with Poland, Romania, and Moldova because Ukraine’s airspace remains closed to civilian flights. Ukrinform, citing the United Jewish Community of Ukraine, later reported that about 45,000 pilgrims were already in the city and that organizers were speaking of 50,000. Those numbers should be read as estimates in a crowded, fast-moving operation, not as a census. They are large enough, in any case, to change the life of a city whose pre-2022 population was a little over 80,000.
Former presidential spokeswoman Iuliia Mendel put the scene in one post on 8 September: large groups were still crossing the border; several thousand were already in Uman; organizers expected up to 40,000 from Israel, the United States, and elsewhere; war, missile risk, martial law, and a U.S. “do not travel” warning had not stopped them. That post is the source of the explainer that circulated this week in international coverage. The video attached to it shows what the written tallies do not: white shirts, black hats, buses, and a city that has learned to absorb a temporary second population.
For a sense of how Planet Today covered the same gathering a year earlier, see Jews flock to Ukraine for New Year pilgrimage despite travel warning. The 2025 piece recorded more than 35,000 arrivals and the same basic tension: Kyiv warning against large crowds, pilgrims coming anyway.
Large groups of Hasidim are crossing into Ukraine and heading to Uman for Rosh Hashanah. Several thousand are already there. By September 11, when the Jewish New Year begins, organizers expect up to 40,000 pilgrims from Israel, the US and around the world. War, missile risk,… pic.twitter.com/eklA9ZzENB
— Iuliia Mendel (@IuliiaMendel) September 8, 2026
Who the pilgrims are
Hasidism is a stream of Orthodox Judaism that rose in the 18th-century Polish–Lithuanian lands that now include Ukraine. It split, over time, into courts, each with its own rebbe, customs, and songs. The people who dominate Uman in Tishrei belong mainly to Breslov, a court that never appointed a successor after its founder died. That absence of a living rebbe is not a weakness in Breslov teaching. It is the reason the grave matters so much.
Breslov is not the whole crowd. Reporting from Israel and Ukraine over the past two years has been careful on this point. The core is Breslov. Around it stand other haredi groups, religious Zionists, baalei teshuva, Sephardi Jews, and Israelis who would not call themselves Hasidic at all. An Israel Democracy Institute survey, cited by The Times of Israel in 2025, found that about eight percent of Jewish Israelis over 18 had visited Uman at least once, and that the visitors were not only ultra-Orthodox. That mix is why “Hasidic pilgrimage” is a useful headline and an incomplete description.
Most travelers still come from Israel. Others come from the United States, France, Britain, and smaller communities. Since 2022 they have flown into Poland, Romania, Moldova, Hungary, Slovakia, or Bulgaria and finished the journey by bus, minibus, or, increasingly, chartered trains. The route is long. Followers treat the difficulty as part of the point.
Who Rabbi Nachman was, and why the grave is in Uman
Nachman of Breslov was born in 1772 in what is now Ukraine. He was a great-grandson of Israel Baal Shem Tov, the figure usually named as the founder of Hasidism. Nachman built a small, intense circle around prayer, simplicity, and joy. He told his students that gathering with him for Rosh Hashanah stood above his other teachings. He died in Uman in 1810 and was buried there. The annual “kibbutz,” or ingathering, grew from that instruction.
He moved to Uman only months before his death. Historical accounts say he chose the city because thousands of Jews had been killed there in 1768, during the Haidamak uprising known as the Koliivshchyna, and he wanted to be buried near the dead. That choice tied a new Hasidic court to an older Jewish catastrophe. Uman later became a majority-Jewish town. By the 1897 census, Jews were 59 percent of the population. The community was destroyed in the Second World War. After Nazi occupation, about 17,000 Jews from Uman and the surrounding area were killed. The grave survived. The mass pilgrimage did not, not at today’s scale.
Under Soviet rule the visits shrank to a trickle. After 1991 they grew. By the 2010s Uman in late September looked less like a quiet provincial city and more like a temporary religious capital. Temporary housing, kosher kitchens, medical teams from Israel, and a tourist tax all followed the pilgrims. In July 2025 Ukraine raised the gravesite to the status of a cultural heritage monument of national significance. That bureaucratic upgrade is one reason local officials now talk about the gathering as both a security problem and an asset.
What Rosh Hashanah asks, and why the dancing is not the liturgy
Rosh Hashanah is not a secular countdown. It is two days of prayer, judgment, and memory. The shofar is sounded. The liturgy speaks of a book that is opened. Breslov followers add a second layer. Nachman told them that his Rosh Hashanah gathering “surpasses everything.” After he died they kept coming to the same place at the same time. That is why the city’s largest influx is not in summer and not on Shabbat in an ordinary month. It is now.
The singing and dancing that fill the streets are not commanded rites of the New Year. They are Hasidic custom, and they are specifically Breslov. Nachman taught that despair is a kind of exile and that joy is a form of repair. His followers recite the Tikkun HaKlali, a set of ten psalms he prescribed. They also dance. Ukrainian outlets this week described thousands pausing at noon to repeat a prayer broadcast over loudspeakers, then returning to song. To a camera the scene looks like a street party. To the people in the circle it is work.
That distinction matters because critics, in Israel and in Uman, often collapse prayer, alcohol, noise, and nightlife into one image. Some of the collapse is fair: police in Cherkasy Region have, in past years, opened cases over drugs and alcohol in the pilgrimage zone, and a dry-law regime is imposed around the gravesite. Some of it is not. The dancing is older than the nightclubs that later grew up around the season.
Do they still come during the war? The numbers say yes
Yes. The pilgrimage dipped in 2020 under Covid border rules and then returned. It did not stop after February 2022. Ukrainian officials and media put attendance at about 35,000 in 2023 and again in 2024, more than 35,000 in 2025, and as many as 40,000 in the forecasts issued before this week. The in-city counts on 11 September 2026 ran higher than those forecasts.
The logistics are now a seasonal industry. Israel has, in recent years, budgeted tens of millions of shekels for transit support, temporary terminals in neighboring countries, police, medics, and translators. In 2025 a planned Israeli-funded terminal near Chișinău collapsed when Moldova wanted to keep the equipment. Flights and buses shifted to other borders. In 2026 Israel again sent officers. Cherkasy regional police said Israeli colleagues were on the ground from early September, working checkpoints, patrols, and the streets where pilgrims sleep.
Uman itself pays a price and collects a dividend. Israel National News, citing Ukraine’s tourism agency and the municipality, reported that last year’s tourist-tax take reached about 20 million hryvnias, up from 17 million the year before. Apartments that rent for ordinary sums in March command festival prices in September. Restaurants and corner shops do a year’s business in a week. Garbage, water, toilets, and emergency medicine do not pay for themselves. Regional governor Ihor Taburets described the operation as a separate, temporary system of security, medicine, and municipal response. A special entry-and-movement regime has been in force in the pilgrimage zone since 4 September.
The travel warning that did not empty the buses
On 3 September 2026 the U.S. Embassy in Kyiv issued a security alert aimed directly at the pilgrimage. The State Department told American citizens not to travel to Uman for Rosh Hashanah. Ukraine remains at Level 4: Do Not Travel. The alert noted that Russian strikes have hit civilian buildings and infrastructure across the country, including Uman, often without warning. Local authorities, it said, do not have enough air-raid shelters for the expected crowd. Martial law, curfew, and movement rules still apply. The curfew in Uman runs from midnight to 4 a.m. Weapons and fireworks are banned.
The same alert carried a second warning that has nothing to do with missiles. Ukraine has ended the old “residence abroad” exception that once let some Ukrainian men aged 23 to 60 leave the country. Male dual nationals, including men who live in the United States, may be unable to exit and may face conscription. That line is easy to skip in a story about dancing. It is not a small line. It is the point at which a religious journey intersects with a state that is short of soldiers.
The full text is on the embassy site: Security Alert: U.S. Embassy Kyiv, Ukraine (September 3, 2026).
Ukrainian diplomats have said for several years that they cannot guarantee visitors’ safety. That has not been a secret. It has also not been decisive. Pilgrims interviewed in 2025 by Ukrainian and Israeli reporters said they felt the spiritual risk of staying home more sharply than the physical risk of coming. Some compared the danger in Uman with the danger in Israeli cities under rocket fire. Those are personal calculations, not policy. Governments issue warnings. Individuals still buy tickets.
What mass media emphasize
Mainstream coverage in Ukraine, Israel, and the English-language Jewish press has settled into a stable pattern. The first paragraph is the crowd. The second is the war. The third is security. The fourth is the grave.
Ukrainian state and commercial outlets — Ukrinform, Censor.NET, UNN, Suspilne, NV — treat the gathering as a domestic logistics story. They quote the Border Guard Service, the Cherkasy police, the regional governor, and the United Jewish Community of Ukraine. They note prayers offered for Ukraine. They note isolated offenses, document checks, and the presence of Israeli officers. They rarely linger on theology.
Israeli outlets — The Times of Israel, Ynet, Israel National News, JTA — add two other plots. One is the haredi draft. In 2025, arrests of yeshiva students at Ben Gurion Airport turned Uman into a proxy fight over who serves and who may leave the country for a holiday. That fight has not disappeared. The other is money. Reports that Israel would spend millions of shekels to ease the journey, while reservists rotate through Gaza and the north, produced sharp columns and Knesset noise. Haaretz opinion pages called the state-backed spectacle a disgrace. Haredi politicians called airport arrests an assault on Torah study. Both claims are part of the public record. Neither cancels the other.
Western wire and embassy language stays on risk: airstrikes, shelters, martial law, dual citizenship. It does not try to explain why a man would leave Brooklyn or Bnei Brak for a city that cannot house everyone underground when the siren sounds. That gap is where the pilgrimage looks irrational to secular editors and obvious to Breslov teachers.
What alternative and critical voices say
The other conversation is louder and less tidy.
In Uman itself, local Facebook groups and Telegram channels have, for years, described pilgrims as a seasonal occupation. A 2025 study in the journal Contemporary Jewry by Alla Marchenko mapped those posts. Residents spoke of noise, blocked streets, closed kindergartens in the “Jewish quarter,” rented flats priced beyond local wages, and a minority of visitors who drink, buy sex, or treat the city as a playground. Religion almost never appeared in those complaints. Behavior did. The same study recorded the opposite fear among some women pilgrims: that canceling the trip would be a spiritual danger greater than the war. Both perceptions can be true in the same week. They do not cancel each other.
Israeli critics on the left and among non-haredi religious Jews attack the pilgrimage on different grounds. They argue that a government at war should not underwrite a mostly male journey to a cemetery while draft exemptions remain a coalition minefield. They point to videos of drunken singing and call the scene an embarrassment. Defenders answer that the state also funds other religious services, that Breslov charity networks feed and house their own, and that judging a two-hundred-year rite by its worst nights is a familiar secular habit.
On X and in Russian-language channels the tone hardens further. Replies under Mendel’s post included the claim that Ukrainian men die so that “settlers” can take houses and wives, and the claim that conscription is “only for goyim.” Those lines are not reporting. They are a ready-made ethnic story laid over a religious calendar. Ukraine’s Center for Countering Disinformation said on 11 September 2026 that Russian-controlled outlets were pushing a related theme: that Hasidic visitors enjoy a privileged status denied to Ukrainians, sometimes with AI-generated images attached. The Center called the campaign an attempt to stir antisemitism and split the home front. Readers can weigh that assessment against the posts themselves. The existence of the posts is not in doubt.
There is a smaller, older conspiracy register as well: that the pilgrimage is a land grab, a secret political project, or proof of dual loyalty. No public document supports those leaps. What the documents support is more ordinary and more interesting. A religious movement with a precise instruction about a grave has built a transnational logistics machine. A city under martial law has decided, year after year, that the machine may still enter. Neighboring states rent their border posts. Israel sends police. The United States tells its citizens to stay home. All of those facts can sit on the same page.
Security on the ground
Cherkasy regional police described checkpoints at the edge of the pilgrimage zone, baggage scanners, extra investigative teams, foot and vehicle patrols, and a visa-support point. Alcohol sales are restricted in the core area. Fireworks are banned. Officers have not published a full headcount of Ukrainian personnel. They have confirmed that Israeli police are present until the holiday ends.
By Friday afternoon, regional police spokeswoman Zoia Vovk said there had been no serious offenses, only isolated conflicts. Israeli police spokesman Mikhail Zingerman spoke of drug and document violations and of some would-be visitors being turned away or deported. Ukrainian officials did not separately confirm every Israeli figure. That discrepancy is typical of a joint operation in which each side briefs its own public.
Police also said they were checking a local complaint that unknown people had harassed a 15-year-old girl. The allegation is under investigation. It belongs in the record because the pilgrimage’s hardest local criticism has always been about how a temporary crowd treats a permanent city, especially women and children who live on the same streets.
Uman has been struck before. That is why the embassy mentioned the city by name. It is also why officials refuse to promise that a dense gathering is safe. A dry law and a checkpoint ring can stop a bottle and a firework. They cannot stop a drone.
Money, strain, and a small city’s bargain
For ten days Uman is not only a shrine. It is a cash machine and a public-works emergency. The daily tourist tax, collected in part by digital scan, was set this season at 432.35 hryvnias for private lodgings and 216.18 hryvnias for hotels and hostels. Organizers negotiated a cheaper prepaid rate. The city earmarks the revenue for infrastructure, schools, and clinics. Shopkeepers and landlords keep what the tax does not take. Municipal crews work through the night on waste and water. When the buses leave, the extra toilets disappear and the ordinary city returns, a little richer and a little more tired.
That bargain is why conspiracy talk about “occupation” and official talk about “tourism” can describe the same week. Apartments change hands. New lodging goes up near the grave. Locals see a skyline that no longer belongs only to them. Pilgrims see a town that exists, in their calendar, for twelve days and then recedes. The war makes the contrast sharper. A country that rations electricity and men still opens a corridor for a religious peak season. Some Ukrainians call that hospitality. Some call it a distortion of wartime priorities. The tax receipts do not settle the argument.
Related reading on how money, security hardware, and allied politics now travel together sits in adjacent Planet Today files, including Canada’s air-defense package for Ukraine and the Golan–Sara Netanyahu dispute over October 7. Those stories are not about Uman. They are about the same season of strained alliances and domestic fights that now wrap a grave in Cherkasy Region.
A short history of interruption
The gathering has been interrupted before. Tsarist and Soviet police limited it. The Holocaust emptied the town that had made the grave possible. After 1991 the crowd grew faster than the city’s plumbing. In 2020, Covid rules closed borders; some pilgrims still tried to come. In 2022, Russian columns and closed skies forced a new map. The map held. Each year since, the question has been asked as if it were new: will they come? Each year the buses answer.
That persistence is the fact that both admirers and detractors have to live with. Admirers see fidelity. Detractors see stubbornness, or privilege, or a cult of personality around a dead teacher. The teaching itself is brief. Come for Rosh Hashanah. Do not despair. Dance.
What remains unsettled
Several points are still in motion as the holiday starts.
First, the headcount. Border entries, municipal estimates, Jewish community tallies, and Israeli police figures do not match. They rarely do. Treat 40,000 as the planning number and the mid-40,000s as the live range reported on 11 September.
Second, the draft. Israel’s fight over haredi enlistment will outlast this Tishrei. Uman will remain a stage on which that fight is performed, because the men who most want to be at the grave are also the men whose military status is most contested.
Third, the information war. Russian channels will keep framing the visitors as a protected class. Ukrainian agencies will keep calling that framing a psy-op. Local residents will keep posting about noise and prices, which need no foreign handler.
Fourth, shelter. The embassy’s warning about insufficient cover is the one official sentence that should follow the reader out of the article. A city can tax pilgrims. It cannot improvise an underground for 45,000 extra people.
None of that tells a believer whether to board the bus. Nachman’s students have always said the obstacles are part of the road. The war is a larger obstacle than mud or a closed ticket window. It has not, so far, been large enough.
How to read the dancing
If you watch only the clips, Uman in September looks like a contradiction: black coats under a sky that still carries drones, songs in a language the city no longer speaks as its own, joy in a country that has spent four years counting the dead. If you read only the critical columns, it looks like a publicly subsidized escape. If you read only the community statements, it looks like gratitude and miracle.
The narrower account is simpler. A teacher who died in 1810 asked his people to meet him at the New Year. They still do. Empires have changed around the grave. The instruction has not. The dancing is how Breslov Hasidim say they are not in despair. Whether that is wisdom, folly, or both is a judgment this dispatch does not have to make. The buses are already in Uman. The holiday has begun.
Sources
- Original explainer: RT World News, 11 September 2026
- Field post: Iuliia Mendel, 8 September 2026
- U.S. warning: U.S. Embassy Kyiv security alert, 3 September 2026
- Latest attendance: Ukrinform, 11 September 2026; Israel National News / SBGS figures, 10 September 2026
- Security and local policing: UNN, Cherkasy regional police briefings, Mezha, 7–11 September 2026
- Israeli political context: The Times of Israel, JTA, Ynet, Haaretz opinion, 2025–2026
- Local social media and gender/safety analysis: Alla Marchenko, “Perceptions of Danger Around Jewish Pilgrimages to Uman,” Contemporary Jewry, 2026
- Disinformation claim: Ukraine Center for Countering Disinformation, 11 September 2026
- Planet Today, prior coverage: Jews flock to Ukraine for New Year pilgrimage despite travel warning (23 September 2025)
Original source and date: The backbone of this explainer follows the 11 September 2026 RT World News report “Why tens of thousands of Hasidic Jews are flocking to Ukraine – and why they are dancing,” itself built around Mendel’s 8 September post and Ukrainian official figures. Attendance, embassy language, and police comments after that report have been updated from primary and local outlets dated 10–11 September 2026.
Disclaimer for fact-checkers: RT is a Russian state-funded outlet. European regulators and many Western governments treat it as a propaganda channel. That status does not automatically make every historical date in an explainer false, and it does not make Ukrainian or Israeli outlets automatically true. The reverse is also available: Russian readers are told that European and American mass media are propaganda. The workable method is ordinary. Separate the rite (18th- and 19th-century Breslov history, the 1810 burial, the post-1991 revival) from the wartime claims (headcounts, shelter capacity, dual-citizen conscription, who funds the buses). Check those claims against the U.S. Embassy alert, the State Border Guard Service, Ukrinform, Cherkasy police, and named Israeli papers. Treat Telegram commentary and reply-guy geopolitics as speech, not evidence. This article records the pilgrimage as it is described by people who make it, people who host it, people who warn against it, and people who resent it. It does not ask the reader to enlist in any of those camps.
Original article: Why Tens of Thousands of Hasidic Jews Still Dance in Wartime Uman on Planet Today 🚀
Automatically republished from the main blog.