A large fire broke out late Friday night at a Jewish visitor’s center near the grave of the founder of the Chabad Chassidic movement in Ukraine.
The cause of the blaze, which destroyed the complex in the Ukrainian city of Hadiach, was not immediately clear, but initial indications are that an electrical fault may have started the fire.
No injuries were reported in the fire, which broke out shortly before midnight.
The visitor’s center gutted in the blaze included a synagogue, kitchen and reception hall.
“We are in total shock,” local Chabad emissary Rabbi Shneur Zalman Deitsch said. “The damage is incomprehensible. This is very painful.”
The rabbi noted that a group of Jewish visitors from Kyiv that was staying at the site over Shabbat managed to save the four Torah scrolls from the blaze.
“We will find the strength to reconstruct everything anew ... and make it bigger and better,” he said.
The complex is considered the second-largest Jewish pilgrimage and prayer site in Ukraine, after the grave of Rabbi Nachman of Breslov located in the city of Uman.
Shneur Zalman, commonly known as the Alter Rebbe or Ba’al Hatanya, was born in 1745 in the small town of Liozna, the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth (in present-day Belarus), and became the founder and first Rebbe of Chabad, a branch of Chassidic Judaism.
While fleeing the advancing armies of Napoleon due to his active support for the Russian czar, he fell ill and passed away in the Russian village of Peyena, in the Kursk Governorate, in 1812.
His body was transported about 125 miles by wagon to Hadiach, in east-central Ukraine, where his gravesite became a Jewish pilgrimage destination.
The Ukrainian city’s Jewish population was murdered during the Holocaust, and after World War II Communist rulers obstructed access to the rabbi’s grave.
In the early 1990s, the New York-based seventh Lubavitcher Rebbe, Menachem Mendel Schneerson, instructed Chabad emissaries to restore the grave, and it once again became a major pilgrimage site.
