The Funeral in Teveria

It is told that the Ohev Yisroel left this world in Mezhibuzh at night, on 5 Nissan, with Pesach ten days away. At that very hour, far off in Teveria beside the Kinneret, someone rapped on the windows of Kollel Vohlin. This was a body that shared out support money among struggling religious Jews who had come from Europe to live in Eretz Yisroel.

Only the caretaker, who kept the keys to the cemetery gates, was inside. A voice from outside ordered him to come out and walk behind the bier of the Rav of Apta. When he stepped out he shook with fear, because a hushed multitude of countless forms from the Other World was trailing the bier. One of them let him know that the procession was for the Tzaddik of Apta, who had died in Mezhibuzh, and that malachim (angels) were carrying his coffin to lay it in the soil of the Holy Land.

At daybreak the caretaker described what he had seen, but nobody believed him. An elderly sage proposed that everyone walk to the cemetery, and there they saw a grave with freshly turned earth. Later, letters from Apta confirmed that the tzaddik had died that same day.

Before he died, the Apta Rav had cried out to Heaven against the length of the exile, asking why Moshiach delayed. In his anguish he said,"Before Rav Levi Yitzchok of Berditchev left this world, he promised that he would not rest, and would not let the tzaddikim in the World of Truth rest, until their pleas brought the final redemption. But when he arrived there, the holy souls in Gan Eden delighted in his company and went up with him to the palaces of supernal joy, until he forgot his own promise. But I will not forget."

In 1930, when Rav Chaim Elozor of Munkatch toured the holy places of Eretz Yisroel, he inquired among the oldest people in Teveria whether anyone knew the Apter Rav's burial spot. They brought him to a particular stone slab in the old cemetery, which their own elders, by then in the World of Truth, had pointed out as the Ohev Yisroel's resting place.