While the shtetls of Eastern Europe tended to have populations split roughly evenly between Jews and Gentiles, the Ukrainian town of Berdichev was a mega-shtetl, with Jews constituting some 80 percent of its population for much of its history; it was also larger in absolute numbers than most of the other market towns where Polish and Russian Jews once lived. In the late 18th century, its claim to fame became the presence of a major ḥasidic holy man by the name of Levi Yitzḥak, whose grave has remained a pilgrimage site to this day. Yet, even though the grave’s location has been preserved, only recently has his actual tomb been found. Dovid Margolin explains:

[I]n the first decade of Bolshevik rule [in the Soviet Union], an unrelenting onslaught [on traditional Jewish life] was led by the yevsektsii, the Jewish sections of the Communist party, [which] worked to uproot every vestige of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob—confiscating synagogues, beating rabbis, and paving over Jewish cemeteries. The yevsektsii were most powerful in traditionally Jewish areas, and there was no place more Jewish than Berdichev.

“The conversion of the 200-year-old Jewish cemetery of Berdichev into a public park has resulted in a war between religious Jews and policemen and laborers employed in excavating the cemetery and transforming it into a park,” the Jewish Telegraphic Agency reported on July 12, 1929. While the city’s rabbinate proclaimed that ancient Jewish remains were being desecrated, “the Communists declare that . . . only the skeletons of horses have been dug up.”

Berdichev’s oldest cemetery was indeed destroyed and is today the city’s central Park Shevchenko. [But] one grave remains—that of a legendary Berdichev rabbi named Liber the Great (d. 1771). Rabbi Levi Yitzḥak, on the other hand, was buried in what was a relatively newer cemetery, destruction of which it seems the Jewish section did not get around to. In 1930, Stalin ordered the yevsektsii disbanded, and by the end of the year Jewish Communists had lost their power in the city.

[It seems that] some time after this episode, to head off the destruction of the rabbi’s grave, observant Jews in Berdichev themselves took down the brick mausoleum surrounding the grave and capped it with pavement and a headstone in order to make it less of a target.

Surveying news websites and social media on Sunday morning, I immediately found some intelligent and well-informed observers arguing that Iran deliberately warned the U.S. of its pending assault on Israel, and calibrated it so that there would be few casualties and minimal destructiveness, thus hoping to avoid major retaliation. In other words, this massive barrage was a face-saving gesture by the ayatollahs. Others disagreed. Brian Carter and Frederick W. Kagan put the issue to rest:

The Iranian April 13 missile-drone attack on Israel was very likely intended to cause significant damage below the threshold that would trigger a massive Israeli response. The attack was designed to succeed, not to fail. The strike package was modeled on those the Russians have used repeatedly against Ukraine to great effect. The attack caused more limited damage than intended likely because the Iranians underestimated the tremendous advantages Israel has in defending against such strikes compared with Ukraine.

But that isn’t to say that Tehran achieved nothing:

The lessons that Iran will draw from this attack will allow it to build more successful strike packages in the future. The attack probably helped Iran identify the relative strengths and weaknesses of the Israeli air-defense system. Iran will likely also share the lessons it learned in this attack with Russia.

Iran’s ability to penetrate Israeli air defenses with even a small number of large ballistic missiles presents serious security concerns for Israel. The only Iranian missiles that got through hit an Israeli military base, limiting the damage, but a future strike in which several ballistic missiles penetrate Israeli air defenses and hit Tel Aviv or Haifa could cause significant civilian casualties and damage to civilian infrastructure, including ports and energy. . . . Israel and its partners should not emerge from this successful defense with any sense of complacency.