It was in Mezhibuzh, on the night of the fifth of Nissan, ten days before Pesach, 1829, that Rav Avrohom Yehoshua Heschel, the Ohev Yisrael of Apt, departed this world. On the very same night, in the holy city of Teverya, on the shore of the Kinneret (Sea of Galilee, Eretz Yisrael), people heard a knocking on the windows of Kollel Vohlin, one of the organizations responsible for the fair distribution of funds in support of the struggling religious Jews from Europe in Eretz Yisrael. Inside was the caretaker, alone, the one who held the keys to the gates of the cemetery. The voice from outside said, “Go outside and follow the bier of the Rav of Apt!”
He ventured outside and was chilled by terror, for the bier was being followed by a grim retinue of myriad human forms from the Other World. One of these followers intimated to him that this was the funeral procession of the Tzaddik of Apt; he had passed away in Mezhibuzh, and malochim had borne his coffin for entombment in the soil of the Holy Land.
The beadle repeated his story in the morning. People refused to believe him, until on the suggestion of an elderly sage they went together to the cemetery, and there they found a newly-covered grave.
Letters from Apt later confirmed that the Tzaddik had indeed passed away on that very day. Before his passing, he had cried out to Heaven in bitter protest over the length of the exile. Why was the Moshiach tarrying so long? And in his heartache he had wept and said, “Before Rav Levi Yitzchok of Berditchev left this world he promised that he would not rest, nor allow the Tzaddikim in the World of Truth to rest, until their insistent pleas would bring about the Messianic Redemption. But when he arrived there, the saintly souls in the Garden of Eden found spiritual delight in his company, and ascended with him to the palaces of supernal bliss – until he forgot his own promise. But I will not forget!”
When Rav Chaim Elozor of Munkatsch visited the holy sites in the Land in 1930, he asked about among the oldest citizens of Teverya as to whether any of them knew where the Apter Rav was buried. They led him to a certain stone slab in the old cemetery that their hoary elders, who were now in the World of Truth, had shown them – the place where the Ohev Yisrael had been brought to rest.
[Source: Adapted by Yerachmiel Tilles from the rendition in A Treasury of Chassidic Tales (ArtScroll), as translated by our esteemed colleague, Uri Kaploun, from Sipurei Chassidim by Rav S. Y. Zevin.]
