Every year tens of thousands of men travel to a town in central Ukraine to spend two days at the grave of a rabbi who died in 1810. If you are making that journey for the first time, or driving someone who is, this page explains what the pilgrimage is, what is read there, and — most practically — what the 5787 calendar means for when you have to arrive.
Written for travellers, by the company that drives them. It is background, not a halachic guide; for questions of practice, ask your own rabbi.
Breslov is the Hasidic movement that formed around Rabbi Nachman (1772–1810), a great-grandson of the Baal Shem Tov. What sets it apart from every other Hasidic group is simple: Rabbi Nachman appointed no successor, and there has been no living Rebbe since he died. Other Hasidim gather around a rebbe's court; Breslov Hasidim gather around his books and his grave. It earned them the nickname the “dead Hasidim”.
Two practices stand out to an outsider. The first is hitbodedut — an hour a day of unstructured private prayer, spoken aloud, alone, in your own language rather than a liturgical one, as Rabbi Nachman put it, as though talking to a good friend. The second is the insistence on joy: “it is a great mitzvah to be always happy” is among the most quoted lines in the movement, and it is said in full knowledge of how hard that is, by a man who buried a wife and four children and died at thirty-eight.
Likutei Moharan — “the collected teachings of our teacher Rabbi Nachman” — is his principal work: the lessons he delivered, transcribed and arranged by his closest disciple, Reb Noson of Nemirov. The first volume appeared in 1808, in Rabbi Nachman's lifetime; the rest followed in 1811 and 1815, after his death.
It is not a systematic treatise. The lessons move between Talmud, Kabbalah, psychology and storytelling, and are read and re-read rather than worked through once. Almost everything else in the Breslov library is, in one way or another, a commentary on it.
The Tikkun HaKlali — the “general remedy” — is a fixed sequence of ten psalms that Rabbi Nachman prescribed as a comprehensive spiritual rectification. He first taught the idea in 1805, saying at that stage that any ten psalms would serve, corresponding to the ten expressions of song in the book of Psalms. In 1810 he named the specific ten.
They are recited in this order, not in numerical order by accident: Psalms 16, 32, 41, 42, 59, 77, 90, 105, 137, 150. Many pilgrims say the Tikkun at the grave itself, and it is the single text most associated with a visit to Uman.
Likutei Tefilot — “collected prayers” — was composed by Reb Noson, the same disciple who compiled Likutei Moharan. Each prayer is built on one of his master's lessons, turning teaching into direct address. Rabbi Nachman had encouraged exactly this: that Torah should be turned into prayer.
For a visitor it is worth knowing because it explains something you will see. Much of what sounds like spontaneous personal prayer around the site is people reading Reb Noson, in a book that was written to be said in the first person.
The gathering is older than the grave. Rabbi Nachman held it in his own lifetime and pressed his followers to be there: “My Rosh Hashana is greater than everything,” he said, “my whole matter is only Rosh Hashana” — and he asked that no one close to him be missing. When a follower objected that the lodgings were poor and he would not be able to pray properly, the answer was blunt: whether you eat or do not eat, whether you sleep or do not sleep, whether you pray or do not pray — just be with me for Rosh Hashana. His disciple Reb Noson recorded these sayings in Chayei Moharan.
He spent his last Rosh Hashana in Uman, in the autumn of 1810, and died there about two weeks later. The year after his death Reb Noson gathered the followers at the graveside on those same days. It has been held ever since, including through the Soviet decades when reaching Uman was effectively forbidden and only a handful managed it: twenty-seven came in 1938, eleven in 1948, single figures through the fifties and sixties.
A second tradition is often merged with the first, and the two are distinct. Chayei Moharan records that before his death Rabbi Nachman made a promise before two named witnesses concerning anyone who would come to his grave, give a small coin to charity in his memory and recite the ten psalms of the Tikkun HaKlali — that he would intercede for that person, on the condition that they resolve not to return to their old ways. That promise is not tied to Rosh Hashana; no text joins the two, and the condition is routinely dropped when it is retold.
The modern scale is new. Two thousand came in 1990, over ten thousand by 2000, twenty-five thousand in 2008. In 2025 Ukraine's State Border Guard Service told AFP that more than thirty-five thousand pilgrims entered the country for the festival. Published figures for a given year often disagree, and they count border crossings rather than heads in Uman.
Rosh Hashana 5787 begins at sundown on Friday 11 September 2026 and ends at nightfall on Sunday 13 September 2026. The first day of the festival falls on Shabbat.
That produces one continuous block of roughly forty-eight hours in which observant pilgrims will not travel, drive, be driven, handle money or carry luggage — from sundown on the Friday straight through to nightfall on the Sunday. There is no gap in the middle.
The practical consequence is the most important thing on this page. You must be in Uman and settled in your accommodation well before sundown on Friday 11 September, with hours to spare, not minutes. Arriving on the Friday itself is the classic way this trip goes wrong: a border queue that runs long has no remedy, because at sundown the journey simply stops wherever you are. Plan to arrive on Thursday 10 September.
Leaving is the mirror image. Nobody departs before nightfall on Sunday, so demand concentrates on Sunday night and Monday 14 September. Note that the Monday is the Fast of Gedaliah, from dawn to nightfall — travel is permitted, but most passengers will be making a long road journey to the border without eating or drinking, which is worth planning around.
Uman is a town of about eighty thousand people in Cherkasy Oblast, in central Ukraine, first documented in 1616. It sits roughly midway between Kyiv and Odesa on the M05 highway — about 200 km south of Kyiv and about 270 km north of Odesa.
For most of the year it is an ordinary provincial town, known within Ukraine for Sofiyivka Park rather than for the pilgrimage. For two days each autumn its population effectively rises by close to half.
We drive pilgrims from any airport, border crossing or train station to Uman and back, with Hebrew-speaking drivers, no payment until you ride, and all border fees and waiting time included. For Rosh Hashana, book early: the days before the festival are the busiest of our year.
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