- Q. I heard in our Beis Hamedrash that the 24th day of Av is a special day and therefore Tachanun should be avoided. Why is that day so special?
A. Sources quote that on the 24th day of Av the Chashmonaim replaced the Hellenic legal code with a Jewish one. So therefore this day was celebrated as a holiday.
Another most important celebration is that, tradition maintains that it is also the day when Bogdan Chmielnicki Ymshv’z, leader of the Cossacks perished (6 August 1657).
When this most evil individual, who was the leader of a peasant uprising against Polish rule in the Ukraine in 1648 it resulted in the criminally and voluntary destruction of hundreds of Jewish communities. Chmielnicki was bent on eradicating the Jews from the Ukraine. In the course of their campaigns his followers acted with extreme savage and unremitting cruelty against the Jews. Chmielnicki was bent on eradicating the Jews from the Ukraine.
The Jewish chronicles mention that close to 400,000 killed and more than 300 communities were destroyed. It was during the months of May to November 1648 that most of the massacres took place.
In the annals of the Jewish people, Chmielnicki is branded as "Chmiel the Wicked," one of the most sinister oppressors of the Jews for most generations, the initiator of the terrible 1648–49 massacres, known as “Gezeroth Tach Vetath.” Chmielnicki has gone down in history also as the figure principally responsible for the holocaust of Polish Jewry in that period.
Under the impact of the calamity, the Council of Lithuania, at its meeting of 1650, decreed three years of consecutive mourning. This took the form of a prohibition on wearing elaborate clothes or ornaments during that time, and it was decided that "no musical instrument be heard in the House of Israel, not even the musical entertainment at weddings, for a full year"; "suitable measures were to be taken to limit feasts as much as possible" (ibid., nos. 469–70).
Authors of that generation also mention regulations which sought to prevent the increase within the community of the children born to women ravished by the Cossacks. A great effort was then made to ease the plight of thousands of agunot (wives of missing husbands), and the overwhelming majority of the women who escaped were freed from their marriage bonds by halakhic decisions; many precedents in agunot regulations were then established. His death is indeed a date to be celebrated.
Nevertheless, the members of the Ukrainian nationalist movement in recent generations have come to see him as a symbol of the awakening of the Ukrainian people, while Russian nationalists regarded him as a "great patriot" who brought about the unification of Ukraine with Russia. During World War II, a military decoration was named after him, and in 1954 the town Proskurov was renamed Khmelnitski.
There may be correct meaning in the celebrating on that day.
He Died 6 August 1657 that corresponds to 27 Av 5417.
However, as Horav Shlomo Miller Shli"ta often rules. Each Minyan should follow it's own established Minhagim.
Rabbi A. Bartfeld as revised by, Horav Yaakov Hirschman, Horav Dovid Pam, Horav Aharon Miller, Horav Chanoch Ehrentreu and Horav Kalman Ochs Shlit'a
Important Numbers
