Perhaps, at one point in time, this was a small focused group of true believers who felt passionately about a segulah and spiritual uplift from davening at the kever of their rebbe. However, to me, this event has taken on many attributes of a goiyehse type of “new age” festival where we annually read about disorderly groups acting inappropriately on airplanes and while in Uman. They may be a small percentage of those traveling to Uman but they get an outsized amount of negative publicity,. This year especially, the governments of both EY and Ukraine seem to want to limit travel but the Nachmanites clearly don’t care about the public health concerns and simply don’t want to miss their annual event.
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