Why Is the Rebbe Buried in Uman?My Uman, 5787

Sitting around the table after Rosh Hashana, telling it the way you'd tell a friend who has never been. It starts with the week before — a couple of hundred people and easy access to the tziyun on Sunday, harder on Monday, and by Tuesday you had to push your way through. Waves of people arriving every day until the whole place filled. And then the question somebody asks that nobody ever really answers: why is he buried in Uman at all? Thirty years before the Rebbe was born, Gonta came through, city by city. A fire in the square and a tzelem beside it — convert or jump. The mayor of Uman came out to surrender the city and offered his own daughter, Sophia, if the Jews would be spared. Gonta took the daughter and killed the Jews anyway. Thirty thousand of them. Twelve survived, and those twelve dug one pit on a mountain and made a kever achim. Years later the Rebbe passes through Uman on his way to Breslov and stays two weeks — in a room overlooking that cemetery. These neshamos are waiting for me to be metaken them. And he says he wants to be buried there. And another sicha, which is a hard thing to hear: he would have wanted Eretz Yisrael — but if I am buried in Eretz Yisrael, nobod