Rabbi Nachman of Breslov died in Uman on 16 October 1810, aged thirty-eight, and was buried among the victims of the massacre that had destroyed the town's Jewish community forty-two years earlier. Two centuries on, his grave — the tziyun — draws one of the largest annual pilgrimages in the Jewish world. This page sets out what is there, when it can be visited, and how travellers reach it.
Uman148 drives pilgrims to Uman. We are not connected to the site or to any Breslov institution, and nothing here is a ruling on religious practice — for that, ask your own community.
Nachman ben Simcha was born on 4 April 1772 in Medzhybizh, in Podolia, and was a great-grandson of the Baal Shem Tov, the founder of Hasidism, through his mother Feiga. He taught for barely a decade and left a body of work that has been read continuously ever since.
He died of tuberculosis on 16 October 1810 — 18 Tishrei 5571, the fourth day of Sukkot — at thirty-eight. The same disease had already killed his wife and four of his eight children. He had moved to Uman earlier that year, after a fire destroyed his house in Breslov.
He appointed no successor, and Breslov has had no living Rebbe since. That is unusual among Hasidic movements, which are normally led by a dynasty, and it is part of why the grave itself carries weight that elsewhere would rest with a living rebbe's court.
In June 1768, during the Koliivshchyna uprising, haidamak forces under Maksym Zalizniak took Uman after a three-day siege, and the town's Jewish community was destroyed. The dead were buried together outside the town.
How many died is genuinely disputed. Breslov tradition speaks of tens of thousands of martyrs; modern historians put the combined Polish and Jewish toll in the low thousands and treat the larger figures as inflated. What is not disputed is that the community was annihilated.
His academic biographer Arthur Green writes that Rabbi Nachman settled on Uman in order to work with the souls of those martyrs, and to be buried among them when his time came. Breslov tradition preserves the same choice in a different form: that passing through Uman years earlier, he stood among the burial mounds and said it was good to lie there.
The tziyun is in the Pushkina street area of Uman. The old Jewish cemetery was built over with housing during the Soviet period; the grave was located and kept by a Breslov Hasid, and open access resumed after Ukraine became independent in 1991.
The grave now sits inside a prayer hall, with worshippers facing it. Around it are synagogues, mikvaot, guesthouses and kosher kitchens — a quarter that has grown up around the site over three decades. The Kloiz, the Breslov synagogue Reb Noson built in 1834, was turned into a factory in 1936 and later returned to the community.
Street numbers and opening hours circulate online in several conflicting versions and we have not printed any, because we could not confirm them from a source worth trusting. Confirm current arrangements with the community or your organiser before you travel.
Pilgrims come all year. Outside the festival the site is quiet, and a visit is a very different experience from the crush of Rosh Hashana — many people who have been to both say the quiet visit is the one that stays with them.
The site is strictly separated by gender. During Rosh Hashana, Breslov elders have called for the area around the grave to be kept free of women; this was reported in 2017 and the arrangement has recurred. Outside the festival women do travel to Uman and visit. If you are planning a trip as a woman or as a couple, ask your organiser what the arrangements will be for your specific dates rather than relying on a general answer.
Dress and conduct follow ordinary synagogue norms: modest clothing, head covering for men. Photography is discouraged around the grave, and does not take place at all on Shabbat or Yom Tov.
The Rosh Hashana gathering — the kibbutz — is what Uman is known for, and it is older than the grave. Rabbi Nachman held it in his own lifetime and pressed his followers to be there; his disciple Reb Noson recorded him saying that his whole matter was only Rosh Hashana, and asking that no one close to him be missing. 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, and it has been held ever since, through periods when reaching Uman was difficult or forbidden.
The scale has changed beyond recognition. Roughly two hundred and fifty men came in 1988; two thousand in 1990; more than ten thousand by 2000; twenty-five thousand in 2008. In 2025, a spokesman for Ukraine's State Border Guard Service told AFP that more than thirty-five thousand pilgrims entered the country for the festival.
Treat all such numbers as approximate. They count border crossings for the festival period rather than people standing in Uman on the day, and published figures for the same year often disagree.
Ukrainian airspace has been closed to civil aviation since February 2022, so there are no flights into the country. Everyone arrives overland, flying into a neighbouring country and continuing by road — most often through Poland, Moldova or Romania.
In practice that means a flight to Rzeszów, Chișinău, Iași, Kraków, Warsaw, Bucharest or Budapest, then a drive of between five and fifteen hours depending on where you land, plus the border crossing. The border queue is the least predictable part of the journey, and in the days before Rosh Hashana it is the part that decides whether you arrive on time.
We have driven pilgrims to Uman since 2019, from any airport, border crossing or train station, with Hebrew-speaking drivers and no payment until you ride. Border fees, tolls and waiting time are included in the price you confirm on WhatsApp.
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