Yad Vashem marks Hanukkah with menorahs salvaged from the Holocaust

Rare candelabras once belonging to Europe’s thriving Jewish communities used in museum conference, holiday celebrations

The Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial museum launched its first-ever International Conference for Jewish Educators this week by lighting Hannukah menorahs salvaged from WWII-era Europe to mark the Jewish festival of light.

“Each menorah has a unique story similar to those of Holocaust survivors themselves,” conference organizer Ephraim Kaye said in a statement. “Just as we use artifacts and testimonies to tell the story of the Holocaust, so, too, are these Menorahs examples of how Jews put themselves at risk to maintain their Jewish identities.”

Holocaust survivor and Chairman of the Yad Vashem Council Rabbi Yisrael Meir Lau on Monday lit the Krakow Menorah, a rare menorah belonging to the local Polish Jewish community dating back to the late 18th or early 19th century.

The bronze candelabra depicts a facade of a synagogue, a common decorative motif found on Jewish religious objects from Lithuania and Poland prior to the Holocaust. The few remaining Krakow Jews who returned home after the war discovered the menorah intact and donated it to Yad Vashem.

Another menorah used during the conference belonged to Rabbi Dr. Akiva Posner from Kiel Germany, made famous by a 1932 photograph that has come to symbolize the defiance of the Jewish community in Nazi Germany.

A Hanukkah menorah seen in Kiel, Germany in 1932. (Courtesy)

Rabbi Posner, who served as Kiel’s rabbi from 1924-1933, was an outspoken critic of the surge of antisemitic sentiment in the city, and urged Jews to flee Nazi GErmany.

On Hanukkah 1932, months before Hitler rose to power, Rabbi Posner’s wife, Rachel, took a photo of the family Hanukkah menorah from the window ledge of their Kiel home overlooking the building across the street adorned with Nazi flags.

On the back, she wrote in German: “Hanukkah 5692, ‘Death to Judah,’ So the flag says, ‘Judah will live forever,’ So the light answers.'”

The Posners escaped to British Mandate Palestine in 1934.

On Tuesday, the Posner’s grandson Yehuda Mansbach, lit his family’s Hanukkah menorah on the fourth night of the festival.

On Wednesday, over two dozen relatives of a Jewish man who crafted a plywood Hanukkah menorah while imprisoned in Holland’s Westerbork detention camp in 1940, will light the makeshift menorah for the fourth night of Hannukah.

The museum said 38 family members, including one Holocaust survivor, of Zelig Scheinowitz would attend the candle-lighting ceremony.

Ephraim Kaye, Yad Vashem International School for Holocaust Studies, watches as Yehuda Mansbach and family light his grandfather's menorah, December 2016. (Yad Vashem/Isaac Harari) — Ephraim Kaye, Yad Vashem International School for Holocaust Studies, watches as Yehuda Mansbach and family light his grandfather’s menorah, December 2016. (Yad Vashem/Isaac Harari)

All of the Hanukkah menorahs used during the conference belong, or are on loan to the Yad Vashem Artifacts Collection.

With some 30,000 items donated to the museum by Holocaust survivors or their families, the Yad Vashem boasts to have the world’s largest collection of artifacts that “document the daily life of Jews in the shadow of annihilation… testifying to spiritual endurance and artifacts demonstrating the struggle to live a normal life in a difficult, if not impossible, reality.”