Credit: Jerusalem Post (jpost.com)

Jews, don’t go to Uman.

Jeremy Borovitz
Sep 2, 2018 · 2 min read

Jews, don’t go to Uman.

Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish new year, is approaching. Every year, 30,000 Hasidim and hangers-on travel to the small Ukrainian city of Uman, where Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav is buried. According to a Breslov chassidic tradition, one who travels there on Rosh Hashanah and reads 10 special psalms will be blessed with a successful year.

Many find Uman on Rosh Hashanah to be a holy and magical place. They are inspired by the pop-up tent cities filled with prayer, honey, and religious spirit. These individuals are blind to the evils being perpetuated by this pilgrimage, and are themselves contributing to a culture of drugs, prostitution, and crime.

On Rosh Hashanah, Uman is the center of Ukrainian prostitution. It has a thriving underworld which is partially populated by Israeli criminals. Many tourists (notably, Uman is a largely male-only scene) engage in despicable behavior, doing drugs, engaging in violence, even defecating on the street. They treat the local community with disdain, seeing the Ukrainians as only slightly better than animals. They claim that the Ukrainians are “the worst” type of anti-Semites — an anecdotal claim that doesn’t line up with historical fact or modern reality.

Even if you, a Jew who travels to Uman for Rosh Hashanah, are among the majority who do not engage in illicit activity while in Uman, you are complicit in negligence of a terrible crime — especially if you are a Jew who decries the effects of globalization on poor communities across the globe. The hypocrisy of those Jews who organize trips to this Ukrainian city without any thought to the effects on the local population is impossible to ignore. You are participating in the turn of a a middling Ukrainian city into an underworld of crime, prostitution, and despair. If people came into my town and engaged in such behavior, I certainly would resent them as a collective group.

Jews, do not go to Uman. Spend your Rosh Hashanah with family, friends, loved ones, and yourself. Holiness is within you, and the destruction that is happening in a real place that contains real people and real children with hopes for a real future is a real problem. Be part of the solution. And if you still choose to go, consider whether such a trip affects your moral credibility.

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