Dov Ber, the Maggid of Mezritch

The Besht's successor, and the one who turned a circle of followers into a movement. A trained Talmudist and Lurianic kabbalist who had been an ascetic before he came to the Besht, he taught in Mezritch and sent his students out to found their own courts across Poland, Lithuania, Galicia and the Ukraine.

The organisational genius, and the reason the movement did not die with its founder. Almost every Hasidic dynasty on earth traces to a student who sat in his room. ⭐ Note the method: he did not build one institution, he distributed — which is why the movement survived the herem, the partitions, the Haskalah, and eventually the destruction of the world it grew in.