Allan Appel photo
On Thursday just after the sun went down, the first night of Hanukkah, Eric Notkin decided to come to his first ever menorah lighting on the Green simply to show solidarity at a time of rising anti-Semitism — occasioned in no small part by the violent reverberations of the Israel-Hamas war.
He’s a non-religious person whose expressions of his Jewishness, he said, have been entirely cultural, and infrequent. Yet he feared the public lighting, now in its 42nd year, this year might trigger a tense confrontation and he just wanted to be there.
As he approached the Green from Church Street, at the northeast corner that fear of potential protests was ignited when he saw a greenish display that reminded him of the colors of the Palestinian flag.
Eric Notkin on his way to the menorah lighting.
Yet as he neared, what he saw turned out to be quite the opposite, a display of waist-high multi-colored block letters declaring Happy Kwanza.
While menorah lighting celebrations have been controversial and even canceled in other cities across the country, out of concern for confrontational protest, that was not the case in the Elm City.
And the only shouting and carrying-on of the half-hour ceremony that ensued was that of 50 teenage boys from the local Chabad Yeshiva Beis Dovid Shlomo, from Ellsworth Avenue near Whalley, the ceremony’s sponsoring organization, dancing exuberantly and celebrating the Festival of Lights.
“This was the year to be here,” Notkin said.
That was the festive scene as about 150 people – two thirds yeshiva boys, their teachers, families, and friends – watched as the school’s “rosh yeshiva,” or its headmaster, Rabbi Gershom Borenstein, climbed into the waiting bucket of a Parks Department-supplied bucket truck, alongside Mayor Justin Elicker, and the two rose 20 feet into the night sky to light the menorah’s first of eight candles.
“It’s especially important this year to spread light” said one of the event’s organizers and the yeshiva’s program director, Chaim Rapoport. “That’s the way you fight hate, through light and goodness.”
The Mayor with Rabbi David Avigdor, and wife Susanne, who helped inaugurate the first menorah lighting in 1979, with the administration of Mayor Ben DiLieto.
And goodness, he elaborated, is the doing of good deeds.
The menorah also symbolizes, Rapoport went on, how “the Jews fought the Greeks [in a protracted and brutal war, which was by turns also internecine and civil, around 165 B.C.E.]. It symbolizes how they stood strong. Today the modern Greeks are Hamas and anti-Semitism.”
There were several police cruisers about, though no confrontations with anyone ensued, although a low-grade anxiety that one might was percolating among the attendees every bit as much as public Jewish pride.
One woman, a Yale employee, who did not want to be identified, said her mother-in-law had called her and urged her not to come to the lighting for safety reasons. “Don’t be stupid,” she reported was the no-nonsense message.
She is Jewish, the woman continued, but she has a decidedly non-Jewish-sounding last name; that same mother-in-law had also warned her, immediately after Oct. 7, not to reveal at work that she is Jewish.
“No,” I said to her (the mother-in-law), “I’m going to support my people” and come down to the lighting.
And there she was amidst the joyous singing and dancing and the passing out of free menorahs and candles, as a dozen cars, each sporting a menorah or menorah-esque temporary sculpture atop, were forming up on Temple Street for what Rapoport called the grand menorah parade to follow through the streets of New Haven after the formal lighting ceremony concluded.
Joseph Rosenzweig: They're oily but good!
Sporting a black yarmulkah, Mayor Elicker said, “We stand beside you. There’s so much darkness around, one point of light can extinguish it. We are praying for the innocent civilians, all of them, and the light symbolizes the peace we need.”
He also said that as he brings his daughters to many events that his ceremonial role requires him to attend, he does not have any problems cajoling them to come to this one. “This is clearly due to the donuts.”
He was referring to the oily, jelly donuts, which Chabad student 15-year-old Joseph Rosenzweig was busily handing out. “They’re not so healthy with all the oil,” he said, “but it reminds us of the miracle [of the oil] in the menorah.”
Meanwhile on the fringes of the crowd (and trying to stay away from the donuts), retired physician Dr. Peter Rogel and others were engaging in a little more erudite discussion of the ten-year war against the Seleucid Greeks, then dominating the Jews, which culminated in the clearing of the temple of Greek religious statues, the relighting of the menorah, and thus the story of Hanukkah.
“Today people want to kill the Jews,” said Rogel. “That’s different from the Greeks who [only] wanted them not to circumcise, observe the Sabbath” and perform other religious commandments and obligations.
The fuller story of Hanukkah is that the Jews had a civil war, recounted in, among other sources, the Apocryphal Books of the Maccabees, on how best to resist the Greek rulers: Do you accommodate, that is, Hellenize, or do you zealously oppose Greek customs, religion, and rule by taking up arms?
The zealots, led by Judah Maccabee and the Maccabee family, ultimately prevailed, after a bloody civil war, and the only undefiled oil in the temple, which was finally recaptured, lasted, it was said, eight days, not one.
Yet the rabbis and editors of Jewish chronicles over the centuries ever since decided to back-burner the full story of Hannukah. (I personally loved, as a nine-year-old, somehow reading how one of Judah Maccabee’s brothers speared the belly of Greek General Nicanor’s war elephant, thus valiantly prevailing in one exciting ambush.)
The chroniclers did not include the full story in the canon (thus, it’s in the Apocrypha) and relegated it to a minor holiday made major only by modern marketing to compete with Christmas.
That decision was taken at least in part not to remind kings and rulers of the generations to follow that Jews do take up arms, do rebel, do fight. It’s a war saga but also a complex political story, one for today, but it’s not the one, certainly not in its bloody fullness, that is generally taught in Hebrew school.
“We celebrate the miracle of the oil, not the military victory,” concluded Rogel.
And that’s what the yeshiva boys were dancing about, joyously, and peacefully, the fringes of their prayer shawls whirling, on the first night of Hanukkah in New Haven.