March 31 1798 – 14 Nisan 5558
Rebbe Nahman of Breslav arrived in Rhodes on a Turkish warship fleeing from Napoleon’s army, and celebrated Seder night on board ship as he couldn’t disembark during the festival. Born in Medzhybizh in Ukraine, Rebbe Nahman was the great-grandson of Rabbi Israel Baal Shem, founder of the Hasidic movement. Following in his ancestor’s footsteps, he emphasized both solitary meditation and joyous worship as a path to God – despite his own personal tendency to anxiety and depression. Rebbe Nahman journeyed to the land of Israel in 1798 seeking spiritual enlightenment, arriving in Haifa on the eve of Rosh Hashana, in the midst of Napoleon’s Egyptian campaign. After visiting Safed, Mt. Meron and Tiberias, he took ship from Acre almost six months later, as Napoleon’s guns bombarded the city, without ever having set foot in Jerusalem. The Jewish community of Rhodes ransomed him from the ship’s crew, saving him from slavery just in time to celebrate Pesach and God’s delivery of Israel from Egyptian slavery.