The Aliyah of the Vilna Gaon's Disciples

This was seventy years before the First Aliyah. The Vilna Gaon himself tried to go up to the Land of Israel: in 1783 he set out, reached Königsberg and turned back for reasons unknown, writing home the letter Alim li-Terufah. But he left his students a clear charge: returning to the Land is not only a commandment but practical work toward redemption, to be done by hand rather than awaited.

Between 1808 and 1810 three groups of his disciples and their families—the Perushim—set out from Lithuania, led by Rabbi Menachem Mendel of Shklov, Rabbi Sa'adyah ben Natan of Vilna and Rabbi Yisrael of Shklov.

They settled first in Safed, rebuilding an Ashkenazi community beside the old Sephardic one. Blows followed: the plague of 1813, a pogrom in 1834, and the earthquake of 1837 that levelled the town. From 1812 part of the group moved to Jerusalem, where Ashkenazim had been effectively barred since the collapse of Rabbi Yehudah he-Chasid's community in 1720. The Perushim settled that ancient debt and rebuilt the Hurva synagogue, the centre of Ashkenazi Jerusalem.

This was a religious, purposeful aliyah—some of the disciples reckoned on the year 1840 for redemption. Its results were earthly: by mid-century Ashkenazi Jerusalem had grown, and this 'Old Yishuv' became the foundation on which the First and Second Aliyot were laid.