The Hasidim in the Beit Yosef

Two hundred years after Maran’s death, a new kind of pilgrim climbed the hill to Tzfat. In 1777 a group of some three hundred Hasidim — disciples of the Maggid of Mezeritch, led by Rabbi Menachem Mendel of Vitebsk, Rabbi Avraham of Kalisk and Rabbi Yisrael of Polotsk — made the long journey from Eastern Europe and settled in the city. It was the first organised aliyah of the Hasidic movement.

They were Ashkenazim, praying in the new Hasidic way, and Tzfat had been devastated by the earthquake of 1759. They had nowhere of their own to pray. In a letter written the following year, Rabbi Yisrael of Polotsk reported that the Hasidim were praying “in the Beit Yosef” — Maran’s synagogue — until the building of their own synagogue was complete. That synagogue, at the old edge of the city where the Arizal had once welcomed Shabbat, is the one known today as the Ari Ashkenazi.

So the study hall of the great Sephardi codifier became, for a time, the first home of Hasidism in the Land of Israel — one more layer in the long story of these walls.