The Maiden of Ludmir—Hannah Rachel Verbermacher הבתולה מלודמיר — חנה רחל ורברמכר

Born at Ludmir in Volhynia in 1805. As a child she stood out in nothing; the change came in her late teens. She refused to marry and took to keeping commandments not incumbent on women. Her reputation as a scholar and a worker of wonders spread quickly.

Then she began doing what a rebbe does: she received those who came, took petitions for prayer, presided at the Sabbath meal, said Torah at it and distributed shirayim. By some accounts, from behind a partition, so as not to be seen.

The Hasidic world did not accept it. Her father turned to Rabbi Mordechai Twersky, the Maggid of Chernobyl; he persuaded her to give it up and marry. She complied; how long the marriage lasted the sources tell differently.

She ended in the Land of Israel. In Jerusalem people gathered to her again—on Sabbath afternoons, to hear her say Torah. She died in 1888, past eighty.

The case stands in this reference work neither as a model nor as a curiosity, but as what happened: once it occurred, and it is known how it ended.