The Chasidic Rebbe who helped defeat Napoleon

Rabbi Schneur Zalman of Liadi stood up to the secular French revolutionary, lighting a flame of resistance that still burns today

THE OLD, SLOPING Jewish cemetery in Haditch, Ukraine, is one of those rare windows into the past. Look out from the hilltop, as I did recently, and a vista nearly unchanged in two centuries opens up below.

During the winter you’ll see a frozen, grassy clearing dotted with barren birch trees descending to the banks of the placid Psel River. There, at the bottom and to the right, sits the original red brick mausoleum of Rabbi Schneur Zalman of Liadi (1745-1812), the Alter Rebbe.

The founder of the Chabad-Lubavitch Hasidic movement, Rabbi Schneur Zalman lived and taught in White Russia all his life. How he came to rest in central Ukraine’s Poltava region, 600 kilometres south of Liadi, is part of the dramatic tale of the Hasidic master’s last journey in this world.

It is also the story of a Jewish leader who, during the great and terrible year of 1812 confronted and ultimately helped to destroy Napoleon Bonaparte, the emperor of the French and torchbearer of the Revolution, changing the trajectory of Jewish history and with it the world.

FULL STORY The Hasidic Rebbe who helped defeat Napoleon (Tablet)

Photo-illustration: Tablet