Rabbi Menachem Mendel of Vitebsk רבי מנחם מנדל מוויטבסק
led the Chassidim to the Land of Israel in 5537; Pri HaAretz
A disciple of the Maggid of Mezeritch and one of those who carried Chassidut into Lithuania—where it was resisted most fiercely.
The aliyah of 5537. He, with Rabbi Avraham of Kalisk and three hundred followers, set out for the Land of Israel; the journey took half a year, and in Elul they reached Safed. Later the community moved to Tiberias. This was neither a pilgrimage nor a flight: people uprooted whole families to live there.
This was a hundred years before the first Hovevei Zion societies.
To those who stayed behind he wrote letters from the Land of Israel—and those letters became his book, Pri HaAretz. They were read in Belorussia as instruction, and their trace is visible in the Chassidic teaching of the next generation.
Sources give his year of birth only approximately—"about 1730." He died in Tiberias in 5548.
On the timeline
Places
Related
Sources
Acharonim and later rabbinic literature
- Pri HaAretz — his letters from the Land of Israel, gathered into a book
Scholarship
- Encyclopaedia Judaica, “Menahem Mendel of Vitebsk” — the years, the aliyah of 1777 and the community's move to Tiberias
Basis: documents and evidence.