A Lot of Music, and a Little Protest, as Hasidic Jews Come to Ukrainian Town

Happy New Year from Ukraine!

In one of the largest annual Jewish pilgrimages to any site outside of Israel, tens of thousands of Hasidic Jews — almost exclusively men and their sons — flocked to the city of Uman in southern Ukraine this week to celebrate Rosh Hashanah, the start of a new year in the Jewish calendar.

Anticipating their arrival, Ukrainian nationalists earlier this week defied a court order and gathered to protest the event, shouting ''Uman without Hasidim!,'' The Kyiv Post reported. More than 100 people showed up, according to the report, and more than 50 were arrested by Ukrainian riot police. Video posted online captured the fierceness with which those arrests were made.

''We are not anti-Semites; we do not have anything against Jews,'' Tetyana Chornomaz, one of the protest organizers, told The Moscow Times. ''We have many questions regarding their stay in Ukraine,'' she explained, saying conditions are often unsafe and unsanitary with the influx of so many people and that the event needed to be better regulated.

The minor fracas did nothing to diminish the celebration, which by some estimates was expected to attract up to 50,000. As this video said to be from last year's pilgrimage shows, the religious gathering can be an occasion for celebratory music.

There are also many who come to the event and fill the air with more traditional music, as these men did in Kiev this year (or, by the Jewish calendar, now the year 5772):

But why this Ukrainian town? Because Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav, a Hasidic master known for his mystical teachings, asked his followers shortly before his death in 1811 to come and pray at his grave in Uman each year. (The Russian revolution halted the pilgrimages until the fall of the Soviet Union, when they began again in earnest in 1989.)

Two hundred years after the rabbi's death, the event resembles a ''cross between Mount Sinai and Woodstock,'' according Ahron Weiner, a photographer based in New York who has visited Uman on several occasions and put together an audio slide show for The Forward, a Jewish weekly. There is also a collection of photos on Time.com.