BERDICHEV, Ukraine—The hulking gravestones in Berdichev’s old Jewish cemetery are unlike those found anywhere else. Chiseled as if by an ancient shoemaker, the stones were long ago nicknamed valenki for their resemblance to the traditional Russian felt winter boots by that name. Who designed them that way or why is a mystery, but on a pre-Passover morning visit to this place, the scene is surreal, almost ghostly, as row after row of boot-shaped stones stretch into the distance. And then, up ahead—in the middle of the cemetery beyond buried rabbis, merchants and simple folks—is the resting place of Rabbi Levi Yitzchak of Berdichev (1740-1809), the great “defender of the Jewish people.”

A long curving road leads from the cemetery entrance to the famed rabbi’s ohel, his resting place, which seems to stand watch over the Jews of Berdichev and Ukraine. A dirty blue freight train passes on tracks running along the far edge of the cemetery, belching black smoke into the air and breaking the quiet. The winter might be over, but it’s still cold here, the weather tempered only by the morning sun. Inside the brick mausoleum, it’s even colder.

A disciple of Rabbi Dovber, the Maggid of Mezeritch, and a contemporary and friend of Rabbi Schneur Zalman of Liadi, the founder of the Chabad-Lubavitch movement, Rabbi Levi Yitzchak of Berdichev was one of the most beloved of Chassidic leaders. Taking upon himself the role of advocating before the heavenly court on behalf of the Jewish people, centuries later the Berdichever Rav, as he was also known, is still remembered for his fiery love of each and every Jew, inspiring countless stories, plays and songs in the hundreds of years since his passing.

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R. Levi Yitzchak of Berditchev(45)

Berdichev Past and Present

Prayerbooks line the shelves in Rabbi Levi Yitzchak’s ohel, as do works of chassidus, among them the rabbi’s own Kedushat Levi. According to Rabbi Moshe Thaler, the rabbi of Berdichev and director of Chabad in the city since 2002, some 100,000 people visit the gravesite each year, coming at all hours of the day and night. Berdichev, two hours and 15 minutes southwest of Kiev, is a small city, and Thaler’s synagogue is not far from the cemetery. A sign hangs on a wall inviting travelers to visit the local Jewish community. “The community is strengthened when we receive guests,” the sign reads. The very name Berdichev is so intertwined with history and Jewish collective memory that it’s easy to forget that Jews still live in the same city where Rabbi Levi Yitzchak once preached.

“We have a functioning community here,” Thaler tells Chabad.org. “It’s important for people to know that this is not just a museum of what once was.”

The American-born and Israeli-raised Thaler and his wife, Chana, run a Jewish preschool, a daily Kollel Torah group and regular women’s classes. They run children’s programs throughout the year, and before Passover had an active model matzah bakery. A minyan gathers three times a day at Thaler’s synagogue, the city’s only functioning one.

The synagogue boasts a minyan three times a day.

Berdichev was for generations a Jewish city, and legend has it that the city itself was founded by a Jew, a righteous man named Rav Lieber Hagadol. The story goes that after his marriage, Rav Lieber would cross over to the other side of the Hnylopiat River to pray and meditate in the forest. One day, a hunting party led by the local squire’s son came upon Rav Lieber, causing one of the party’s horses to become startled and throw off its rider. In retaliation, they brutally attacked Rav Lieber to the point that he lost consciousness.

Upon returning to his father’s estate, the squire’s son fell into a coma. No doctors could help him. Soon enough, the squire heard about his son’s participation in the beating of a pious Jewish rabbi, who now also lay at death’s door. The squire immediately sent his doctors to care for Rav Lieber, and when the latter awoke begged him to pray for his son’s recovery. Rav Lieber responded that he would do so on the condition that the squire build a synagogue on the spot where the attack had occurred and an additional 10 homes for Jewish families. The squire acquiesced, and his son returned to health. Around Rav Lieber’s synagogue grew the modern city of Berdichev, eventually becoming home to one of the largest Jewish populations in the Russian Empire.

The cemetery in which Rabbi Levi Yitzchak is buried is not the city’s oldest; its earliest known marker displaying a burial in 1808. An older cemetery existed until the 1930s, when the Communist government razed it and built Park Shevchenko on top. Today, it’s still a park, but one Jewish grave remains marked and untouched: that of Rav Lieber Hagadol.

“The mayor has told me that they feel a debt of gratitude to the Jewish people,” says Thaler. “It’s a small city, maybe 80,000 people, but it’s known around the world because of the Jews.”

Rabbi Moshe Thaler settled in Berdichev in 2002. He and his wife, Chana, run programs for all sectors of the Jewish community there.

Rabbi Levi Yitzchak

Undoubtedly, the man Berdichev is most closely identified with is Rabbi Levi Yitzchak, who became the city’s rabbi in 1785 and served in that role until his passing. In addition to his many famous traits, Rabbi Levi Yitzchak was a close confidant of Rabbi Schneur Zalman. It was he who said, upon receiving a copy of Rabbi Schneur Zalman’s foundational work on Chassidic thought, the Tanya: “It is a wonder that he concealed such a great G‑d in such a small book!”

Later, when Rabbi Schneur Zalman was arrested by czarist officials, he sent a messenger to Rabbi Levi Yitzchak to inform him of the charges against him.

Two of the Thaler children at a gravestone bearing the name Sarah, granddaughter of Rabbi Schneur Zalman of Liadi, who was married to Rabbi Levi Yitzchak’s grandson

In 1807, the two great men—already close allies in the battles with opponents of Chassidism and in the internal struggles that followed the passing of their master the Maggid—were bound together through marriage when Rabbi Levi Yitzchak’s grandson married the granddaughter of Rabbi Schneur Zalman in the Belarussian town of Zhlobin, known as “the Great Wedding.” Less known, perhaps, is the tragedy that followed not even two years later when the bride, Sarah, the daughter of Rabbi Schneur Zalman’s son and successor Rabbi Dovber, passed away during childbirth.

A tragic footnote to most, for Thaler this moment in history came to the fore in an unexpected manner when he discovered her grave a few years ago. “We knew that she had passed away while giving birth to a daughter, who was also named Sarah,” says Thaler. “But nobody knew where she was buried.”

While focusing on the local community, Thaler has poured efforts and funds into restoring and maintaining not only Rabbi Levi Yitzchak’s grave, but the entire 70-acre cemetery, which only a few years ago was overgrown and overrun. As part of that work, he reads through the headstones as restoration takes place and was surprised when he came upon an inscription bearing the name of Sarah, the daughter of Rabbi Dovber, who passed away on the 27th of the Jewish month of Adar in 5569 (1809).

Her husband’s illustrious grandfather, Rabbi Levi Yitzchak, passed away seven months later on 25 Tishrei 5570 (1809), after which Rabbi Schneur Zalman traveled to Berdichev to care for the surviving family, staying there for about eight months.

A Soviet-era photo of the synagogue in Berdichev, which sometimes served as home to an underground yeshivah in the 1930s. Today, the building is in need of significant repair, something Thaler hopes to accomplish in the future. (Photo: Shimon Yantovsky)

Drawn to the Gravesite

Some 41,617 Jews lived in Berdichev in 1897, a full 80 percent of the city’s population—a number that would hit its peak just prior to World War I. Following the war and the Russian Civil War, which saw horrific pogroms at the hands of Bolshevik troops, White Army troops and Ukrainian nationalists, by 1920 the Jewish population had dropped by nearly half. With the onset of Bolshevik rule, Berdichev’s shuls and communal property began to be confiscated and repurposed by Communist authorities, with as many as 80 synagogues closed down during that time.

A branch of Chabad’s underground Tomchei Temimim yeshivah system functioned in the city from 1935 to 1938, when the 10 students and teachers were discovered by police in the city’s Tailor’s Synagogue and arrested. The teachers ended up serving prison time; the students were transferred to Soviet orphanages.

Yaakov Shatz headed the clandestine Tomchei Temimim yeshivah in Berdichev and later a branch in Poltava. He was arrested in Moscow in 1937 for taking part in an illegal prayer meeting, convicted and then executed on April 5, 1938. (Photo: Toldos Chabad BeRussia HaSovetis)

At its onset, the yeshivah in Berdichev was led by a 25-year-old Lubavitcher student named Yaakov Shatz, who after his marriage moved to Poltava to head an illegal branch of the yeshivah in that city. He was arrested in Moscow in 1937, and his fate was unknown until the fall of the Soviet Union. His NKVD case file reveals that in December of that year, Shatz was arrested as a “participant in an illegal prayer meeting held in the home of Kok [a Lubavitcher activist in Moscow],” and the prosecution’s file outlines that Shatz was convicted of “fomenting anti-Soviet agitation in his surroundings, and due to his hostile attitude towards Soviet power intending to escape to Palestine.” Shatz was tried by a tribunal of three members of the NKVD, called a Troika, and sentenced to death. A month later, on April 5, 1938, he was executed at the Butova killing grounds outside of Moscow, where his body was dumped.

The Nazis entered Berdichev on July 7, 1941, killing an estimated 30,000 Jews from the city and surrounding areas. Following the war, many Jews returned to the city and a synagogue was reopened, which functioned throughout the Soviet Union’s existence. Although a small city by then, there were still many thousands of Jews living in Berdichev in the late 1980s when the first Chabad emissary to the region, Rabbi Shmuel Plotkin, arrived there. He coordinated Chabad activities in nearby Zhitomir, bringing Rabbi Shlomo and Esther Wilhelm to lead that operation permanently in 1994, and then drawing the Thalers to Berdichev in the early 2000s.

These days, Thaler works actively with the local Jewish population of Berdichev and surrounding towns, while also encouraging some of the younger residents to move to Israel, where they will have a better chance of meeting and marrying other Jews. At the same time, more and more people are coming to see the gravesite of Rabbi Levi Yitzchak, and Thaler has blueprints laid out for a massive visitor’s center and synagogue to be built adjacent to the cemetery.

A model matzah bakery program for children in Berdichev prior to Passover.

A descendant of Rabbi Levi Yitzchak, Thaler feels a connection to the man and the place. He has, in the years since moving to Berdichev, become an expert in all things connected to the holy rabbi, rattling off story after story in a heartbeat.

Like this famous Passover one.

It was the eve of Passover and Rabbi Levi Yitzchak felt a negative decree being readied in the heavens against the Jewish people. Losing no time, he directed his attendant to search Berdichev for contraband alcohol and tobacco—goods that had illegally bypassed the czar’s duties. The attendant returned with news that anything could be bought at the right price.

With the first seder starting in just a few hours, Rabbi Levi Yitzchak now tasked his attendant with finding him a piece of bread, or any chametz, to purchase from a Jew, telling him to offer any price. The attendant searched and searched, but try as he might, he could not find the bread his master had requested.

“G‑d Almighty, look down with pride at Your people!” Rabbi Levi Yitzchak declared. “The czar has border guards and tax commissioners dedicated to his commands. The police and the courts are devoted to tracking down and punishing smugglers and black marketers, and yet anything one could possibly want is available. Contrast this with the faith and fidelity of Your Jews. It has been over 3,000 years since you commanded us to observe Passover. No police, no guards, no courts and jails enforce this edict—and yet every Jew keeps Your laws to the utmost!

“Who is like Your nation, Israel?”

Donations to support efforts in Berdichev can be made here.

A recent women’s gathering and kosher meal at the synagogue.

A daily Kollel Torah class for men takes place at the Jewish center, as does a weekly one for women, seen here.

The gravestones in the Jewish cemetery in Berdichev, unlike those seen anywhere else, have for generations been called “valenki” for the Russian winter boot of similar shape.