p.32 - Israel was born in Pohorbishch, a small town on the bank of the Rus river, which belonged to the Berdicheve district of Kiev Province. [Note: On this town, see Slowinik, VIII, 522-8; Encyclopedia of Ukraine, IV,71; Assaf, Malkhut, 49-76.]
p.72-3 - Rabbi Israel first made his name as a hasidic leader in Ruzhin, a small former Polish town in the district of Skvira, in the province of Kiev, southwest of the city of Kiev and not far north of Pohorbishche. It had been founded in the sixteenth century, halfway between Berdichev and Belaya Tserkov, and annexed to the Russian empire in the second partition of Poland (1793). There, Israel established his new court, and he would continue to be known as Israel of Ruzhin even after he had left it and made his home in foreign parts.
Why did Israel leave Pohorbishch, where he had been born, and where his father and elder brother had lived and died, and when did the move occur? We do not know for sure. The move to Ruzhin may have been motivated by psychological-social considerations: the natural desire to begin afresh, in a place where he had not been known as a child or youth, so that familiarity would not breed contempt and he could start with a clean slate (although, admittedly, the distance from Pohorbishch to Ruzhin was not great).
p.268 - Since we are not interested here in tracing the earliest foundations of the hasidic court, it will suffice to give a general picture of the most typical courts of the "regal" zaddikim of the nineteenth century - those of the Friedman, or Ruzhin-Sadgora, dynasty and its "twin," the Twersky, or Chernobyl, dynasty. The primary focus is on the court of Israel of Ruzhin, whom I consider to be the "founding father" of the "regal" hasidic court. Although we know almost nothing of his courts at Pohorbishche and Ruzhin, considerably more information has reached us about the court at Sadgora and its offshoots in Chortkov, Stefanesti, Husyatin, Boian, and Huhush. Of these, there are both photographs and surviving buildings or parts of buildings, as well as literary, documentary, folkloristic, and memoiristic sources. There was practically nothing resemblish this kind of court elsewhere in Eastern Europe; and neither has anything like it survived to this day, although it has left its mark on the organization of a good many contemporary hasidic courts. The regal courts survived until World War I, during which they were either destroyed or transplnated to other places, such as Vienna. One of hte reasons that these courts were not revived after that war was the tremendous economic burden that they constituted, sometimes even causing them to go bankrupt.
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