Hanukkah celebrates the victory nearly 2,200 years ago of a small group of Jewish farmers over a Syrian-Greek king who tried to eradicate Judaism in what is now Israel.
As the first Hanukkah candle was lit at the county courthouse in downtown Riverside after sundown Sunday, it shined a few steps above a photo of two Jews who were murdered in Mumbai on Nov. 27 after terrorists singled out their Jewish center for attack.
Rabbi Shmuel Fuss, a childhood friend of one of the victims, mourned the couple's deaths and those of the other 170-plus victims. But he also emphasized the hope that Hanukkah symbolizes.
"We move forward," Fuss said. "Hanukkah is about light, about dispelling darkness."
Hanukkah's message of victory over tyranny, of freedom prevailing over adversity, resonated Sunday in the fourth annual Riverside Hanukkah festival.
The festival, sponsored by Fuss' Chabad Jewish Community Center in Riverside, was dedicated to the memory of all Mumbai victims. But Fuss singled out the deaths of Gavriel Holtzberg, his wife Rivkah, and the four other Jews who were killed.
Unlike most of the dead, who were random victims, "they were targeted because, and only because, they were Jews," Fuss said. More than two millennia after the Macabees triumphed over an attempt to stamp out Judaism, Jews are still being killed for who they are.
'uNADULTERATED LOVE'
The deaths of the Holtzbergs were an intensely personal tragedy for Fuss. He grew up with Gavriel Holtzberg in Brooklyn and attended Oholei Torah — a Jewish college in Brooklyn — with him. The two were fellow Chabad rabbis.
The Holtzbergs moved to Mumbai to help others, and they saved many young people from drugs, crime and suicide, Fuss said.
"If the terrorists represented unadulterated hate, they represented unadulterated love," he said.
The man who lit the first menorah candle, the Israeli consul general in Los Angeles, Jacob Dayan, reminded the crowd that promises to destroy Israel garner cheers in the United Nations, and that children in parts of the world are taught to hate Jews.
Yet he, too, spoke of hope. Dayan alluded to the Hanukkah story that, when the Macabees arrived to rededicate the temple they had regained from the Syrians, they found only enough consecrated olive oil to last one day. The oil burned for eight.
"This holiday teaches us that there are miracles," Dayan said. "It's not only that they found oil that was enough for maybe one day for the menorah and was sufficient for eight days. But people thought that the state of Israel, when it was re-established 60 years ago, would survive maybe a decade or two. And this state is going to survive forever and ever, not just 60 years but 3,060 years. And that's a miracle."
Communities' Bond
Dayan received the "torch of freedom" from another symbol of Jews' survival against all odds: Leon Leyson, a Holocaust survivor from Orange County who worked at the Oskar Schindler factory made famous by the film "Schindler's List."
Several Indians were special guests at the festival. India had for centuries been a sanctuary for Jews who faced repression elsewhere. Today, Jews and Indians alike are repeated targets of terrorism.
Lalit Acharya, president of the Riverside Mahatma Gandhi Peace Foundation and an Indian-American, said he attended Sunday's menorah-lighting ceremony to show the continued bonds between the Jewish and Indian communities.
"We all have to pull together, fortified by what happened in Mumbai," Acharya said after the festival. "I felt I needed to be here, as an affirmation of peace and solidarity and togetherness."
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