You don’t generally think of Buffalo as a pilgrimage site. Yet every year, scores of believers travel hundreds of miles to pray at the final resting place of a holy man buried in Cheektowaga.

The grave in question is that of Rebbe Eliyahu Yosef Rabinowitz, considered the first Hasidic rabbi to reside in the United States, who led the congregation at the old Pine Street synagogue from 1908 until his death in 1910. 

Each year at the Rebbe’s yahrzeit (death anniversary), cars and buses from Brooklyn and Toronto filled with Hasidim and other Orthodox Jews arrive at Ahavas Sholem Cemetery on Pine Ridge Heritage Boulevard just off the Kensington Expressway. There they enter the little brick structure that shelters the Rebbe’s grave, passing beneath a Hebrew inscription hailing him as a “wise genius” and “a mover of mountains,” and offer prayers of remembrance. A Yiddish plaque on the door asks that they “don’t let the memory fade

It’s an observance held to honor great Hasidic rabbis, who are almost invariably buried in the New York City area, Israel or in the Jewish cemeteries that remain intact in Eastern Europe. That the grave of such a revered figure could be located in a place like Buffalo is (forgive the pun) a real outlier – so much so that it wasn’t until 1999 that the Rebbe’s gravesite was noticed by Hasidic scholars in New York, and the first pilgrimage was made.

For some Hasidim, figures like the Rebbe are not simply wise men to honor; they are like saints whose spirits can intercede on the behalf of the living. 

Read more from source "Daily Public"