The First Chassidic Aliyah

In 5537—a hundred and ten years before the First Aliyah—the disciples of the Maggid of Mezeritch did what no Chassidim had done before them: they uprooted whole families and went to live in the Land of Israel. There were about three hundred of them, led by Rabbi Menachem Mendel of Vitebsk and Rabbi Avraham of Kalisk.

They arrived by the end of that same year and settled in Safed. Later the community moved to Tiberias, where relations with the long-settled Sephardim proved warmer.

What they lived on. Their own labour could not feed them, and the community was sustained by collections from Eastern Europe: before the departure an arrangement had been made whereby Jews there set aside a little for those living in the Land—as for their own representatives. Out of this grew the chalukah on which the Old Yishuv lived for another century and a half.

Why it matters. Thirty years and the enmity of two camps separate this aliyah from that of the Vilna Gaon's disciples (5568). Yet they did the same thing, from opposite sides: both Chassidim and Mitnagdim concluded that one must live there. The Ashkenazi community of the nineteenth-century Land of Israel grew out of both.

Sources differ on the details of the journey—its length, the port of landing, a ship lost on the way. They agree on the main things: the year, the number, the names of the leaders, Safed first and Tiberias after.